Virginia Woolf

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.
Virginia Woolf

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
Virginia Woolf

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.
Virginia Woolf

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
Virginia Woolf

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.
Virginia Woolf

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
Virginia Woolf

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.
Virginia Woolf

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
Virginia Woolf

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
Virginia Woolf

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
Virginia Woolf

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
Virginia Woolf

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
Virginia Woolf

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
Virginia Woolf

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
Virginia Woolf

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

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

Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
Virginia Woolf

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

I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it.
Virginia Woolf

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.
Virginia Woolf

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
Virginia Woolf

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
Virginia Woolf

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

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
Virginia Woolf

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.
Virginia Woolf

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
Virginia Woolf

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
Virginia Woolf

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
Virginia Woolf