Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew for no one was ever for a second taken in.

But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.

That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly.

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance (...); as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out [in his History of England ], she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.

You're the only person I've ever met who seems to have the faintest conception of what I mean when I say a thing.

Literature is no one's private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.

I went from one to the other holding my sorrow - no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life - for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken - I to whom there is no beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely.

She read everything.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

what she loved: life, London, this moment of June.

madam, the man cried, leaping to the ground, you're hurt! I'm dead, sir! she replied. A few minutes later, they became engaged.

I'm terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.

We're all in the dark. We try to find out, but can you imagine anything more ludicrous than one person's opinion of another person? One goes along thinking one knows; but one really doesn't know

Illness is a part of every human being's experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.

I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.

My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

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 the very opposite of what it is above.

Whenever you see a board up with Trespassers will be prosecuted, trespass at once.

Well, we must wait for the future to show.

If the best of one's feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?

But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second.

I am not so gifted as at one time seemed likely.

For nothing was simply one thing.