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?

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.

For if it is rash to walk into a lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on the top of St Paul's, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet

so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again...