Virginia Woolf
157 quotes
Biography
"I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
"Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more."
"You cannot find peace by avoiding life."
"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."
"Books are the mirrors of the soul."
"Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?"
"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."
"Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue."
"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."
"As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world."
"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."
"When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?"
"Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others."
"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
"Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence."
"A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen."
"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."
"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
"To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away..."
"For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver."
"What does the brain matter compared with the heart?"
"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."
"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others."
"It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning."
"The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."