“I am rooted, but I flow.”
— Virginia Woolf
“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
“Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”
“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”
“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”
“A light here required a shadow there.”
“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”
“I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything.”
“Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.”
“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
“I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.”
“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?”
“Thinking is my fighting.”
“Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.”
“Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.”
“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
“I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”
“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
“Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I’m never not thinking of you.”
“It’s my choice, to choose how to live my life.”
“My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.”
“Language is wine upon the lips.”
“As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”
“The way to write well is to live intensely.”
“Without self awareness we are as babies in the cradles.”
“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”
“Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.”
“Romantic Love is only an Illusion. A story one makes up in One’s Mind about Another Person.”
“To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.”
“I’m terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.”
“The streets of London have their map, but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?”
“I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.”
“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
“I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky.”
“Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.”
“Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence.”
“People ask me why I write. I write to find out what I know.”
“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”
“Fear no more, says the heart...”
“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?”
“Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.”
“Illness is a part of every human being’s experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.”
“She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.”
“Consolation for those moments when you can’t tell whether you’re the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.”
“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
“A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.”
“Be truthful, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting.”
“Writing is a divine art, and the more I write and read the more I love it.”
“In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.”
“Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.”
“Outside the trees dragged their leaves like nets through the depths of the air; the sound of water was in the room and through the waves came the voices of birds singing.”
“The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; My thoughts follow the exact same process.”
“The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.”
“One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one’s words.”
“The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.”
“I like to have space to spread my mind out in.”
“Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it’s place?”
“All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.”
“A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life.”
“To be nothing – is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?”
“I will not be “famous,” “great.” I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.”
“The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.”
“Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody.”
“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”
“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.”
“As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”
“It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.”
“Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.”
“But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.”
“There is a sadness at the back of life which some people do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure.”
“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.”
“Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.”
“Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall.”
“But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.”
“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”
“How remorseless life is!”
“The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
“What a lark! What a plunge!”
“I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore.”
“Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.”
“I like the unreality of your mind; the whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd.”
“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.”
“Like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life.”
“All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”
“They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought.”
“Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.”
“In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Lord, how tired one gets of one’s own writing.”
“I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.”
“I will go down with my colors flying.”
“Melancholy were the sounds on a winter’s night.”
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