Quotes by Virginia Woolf

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.

For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction are strictly limited

All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.

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

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

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

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

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.

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

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

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

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

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.

Every secret of a writers soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.