Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is very opposite of what it is above.

Publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it.

When a subject is highly controversial... one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.

You can not gain peace by avoiding life.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.

As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.

When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.

There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.

Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.

I am rooted, but I flow.

What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.

How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.

Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.