The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. – Virginia Woolf
There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking. – Virginia Woolf
One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats – and one always secretes too much jelly. – Virginia Woolf
The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own. – 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
I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose. – Virginia Woolf
The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness. – Virginia Woolf
Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe. – Virginia Woolf
If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully? – 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
The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself. – Virginia Woolf
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. – Virginia Woolf
These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism. – 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
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
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. – Virginia Woolf
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. – Virginia Woolf
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? – Virginia Woolf
One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph. – Virginia Woolf