Virginia Woolf

Therefore 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 cannotshare; to procure benefits which I have notshared and probably will not share; but not togratify my instincts, or to protect myself or my country. For . . . in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As awoman my country is the whole world.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slipquotations down people’s throats—and one always secretes too much jelly.

When, however, one reads of a witch beingducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of awise woman selling herbs, or even of a veryremarkable man who had a mother, then Ithink we are on the track of a lost novelist, asuppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashedher brains out on the moor or mopped andmowed about the highways crazed with thetorture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, Iwould venture to guess that Anon, who wroteso many poems without signing them, wasoften a woman.

Death is the enemy. . . . Against you I willfling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, ODeath!

I found myself thinking with intense curiosityabout death. Yet if I’m persuaded of anything, it is of mortality—Then why this sense that death is going to be a great excitement?—somethingpositive, active?

It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, Ihave had my vision.

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

[ Of Elizabethan drama :] The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.

On or about December 1910 human characterchanged. . . . All human relations haveshifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children.And when human relations change there is atthe same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.

[ Of James Joyce’s Ulysses:] Never did I readsuch tosh. As for the first 2 chapters we willlet them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th—merelythe scratching of pimples on the body of thebootboy at Claridges.

The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater.

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.

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

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.

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 we didn’t live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I’ve no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.

Arrange what pieces come your way.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

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.

I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

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

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

Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.

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

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.

Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

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

Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings . . . it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes in literature.

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

ONE CANNOT THINK WELL, LOVE WELL, SLEEP WELL, IF ONE HAS NOT DINED WELL.

Vain trifles as they seem, clothes… change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.