Quotes by "Virginia Woolf"

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

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

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.

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.

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.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

The great cathedral space which was childhood.

I have lost friends, some by death ... others by sheer inability to cross the street.

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.

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

Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning.

A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.

Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.

The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second.

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