Quotes by Virginia Woolf

Even the names of the books gave me food for thought.

I want someone to sit beside after the days pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy - to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits.

You send a girl to school in order to make friends - the right sort.

I must be able to say, Percival, a ridiculous name. At the same time let me tell you, men and women, hurrying to the tube station, you would have had to respect him. You would have had to form up and follow behind him. How strange to oar ones way through crowds seeing life through hollow eyes, burning eyes.

Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then—our friends are not able to finish their stories.

It is no use trying to sum people up.

And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally this is so. Yet is it the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are important; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes trivial. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

This idea struck me: the army is the body : I am the brain. Thinking is my fighting. (15 May 1940)

Yes, our old age is not going to be sunny orchard drowse. By shutting down the fire curtain, though, I find I can live in the moment; which is good; why yield a moment to regret or envy or worry? Why indeed? (24 December 1940)

This late age of the worlds experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing.

There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.

Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades. The earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles scorch our feet. By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us.

You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a pleasant one.

Human relations, at least between the sexes, were carried on as relations between countries are now - with ambassadors, and treaties. The parties concerned met on the great occasion of the proposal. If this were refused, a state of war was declared.

The immense success of our life, is I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it.

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.

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