Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.

I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface.

Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.

And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.

I want someone to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy - to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits.

About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.

I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.

Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?

Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read.

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.

Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.

I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.

He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.

who shall measure the heat and violence of a poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?

Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.

But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.

Yes, I deserve a spring–I owe nobody nothing.

It was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy.

So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.

Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure

The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.