Quotes by Virginia Woolf

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”

“To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then to put it away.”

“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we dont have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”

“Its not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; its the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”

“I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens.”

“The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”

“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery -always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? Whats this passion for?”

“These are the souls changes. I dont believe in aging. I believe in forever altering ones aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.”

“If we didnt live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, Ive no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged”

“Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.”

“The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.”

“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 which I have not shared and probably will not share.”

“A woman must have money and room of her own if she is to write fiction”

“If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it was Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded. . ., it was Shakespeares mind.”

“If every a human being got his work expressed completelu, it was Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded . . ., it was Shakespeare s mind.”

“I is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being.”

“To be entirely free, and at the same time, entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life that we realise at every moment.”

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

Love, the poet said, is womans whole existence.