Virginia Woolf Quotes

So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.

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?

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

Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning it satisfies the senses amazingly.

I have lost friends some by death ... others by sheer inability to cross the street.

Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.

He felt himself now, as he had often fancied other people, adrift on the stream, and far removed from control of it, a man with no grasp upon circumstances any longer. Old battered man loafing at the doors of public-houses now seemed to be his fellows, and he felt, as he supposed them to feel, a mingling of envy and hatred towards those who passed quickly and certainly to a goal of their own. They, too, saw things very thin and shadowy, and were wafted about by the lightest breath of wind. For the substantial world, with its prospect of avenues leading on and on to the invisible distance, had slipped from him.