Quotes from Virginia Woolf

war is a man's game ... the killing machine has a gender and it is male.

Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning.

A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowhip with other human beings as we take our place among them.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book shown to him by heart, and his friends can only read the title.

The mind of man works with 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 by the timepiece of the mind by one second.

Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even better.

He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.

As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear, pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

if newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art.

The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.

History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.

In marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house.

I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore.

I prefer men to cauliflowers

Like all very handsome men who die tragically, he left not so much a character behind him as a legend. Youth and death shed a halo through which it is difficult to see a real face.

If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.

Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

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

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.