Virginia Woolf

It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

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

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

The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.

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

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

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.

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.

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

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

One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

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

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

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

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.

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.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

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.

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.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.

A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.

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

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

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

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

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

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 where I have not shared and probably will not share.

For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?

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

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.

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.

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.

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

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.

Language is wine upon the lips.

Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.