Virginia Woolf Quotes

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

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

Yes, always keep the Classics at hand to prevent flop.

Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

I am not trying to tell a story. Yet perhaps it might be done in that way. A mind thinking. They might be islands of light – islands in the stream that I am trying to convey; life itself going on.

For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it.

For there is a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head which one can never see for oneself. It is one of the good offices that s*x can discharge for s*x – to describe that spot.

It is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other s*x… Yet it is the masculine values that prevail.

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.

She faded…became more inconspicuous than ever, in her little grey dress.

So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball.

One of these days I will write about London, and how it takes up the private life and carries it on, without any effort.

People pop in and out, lightly, diver tingly like rabbits; and I look down Southampton Row, wet as a seal’s back or red and yellow with sunshine, and watch the omnibuses going and coming and hear the old crazy organs.

London is enchanting. I step out upon a tawny coloured magic carpet, it seems, and get carried into beauty without raising a finger.

Middle march, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown up people.

For the self-centred and self-limited writers have a power denied the more catholic and broad-minded… Nothing issues from their minds which has not been marked with their own impress.

The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.

It is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek.