Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. – Virginia Woolf
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. – Virginia Woolf
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. – Virginia Woolf
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them. – Virginia Woolf
We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods. – Virginia Woolf
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. – Virginia Woolf
It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work. – Virginia Woolf
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. – Virginia Woolf
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? – Virginia Woolf
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. – Virginia Woolf
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. – Virginia Woolf
Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent. – Virginia Woolf
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print. – Virginia Woolf
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly. – Virginia Woolf
This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant. – Virginia Woolf
Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body? – Virginia Woolf
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. – Virginia Woolf
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. – Virginia Woolf
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. – Virginia Woolf
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. – Virginia Woolf
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. – Virginia Woolf