Virginia Woolf Quotes

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others. I am rooted, but I flow. If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity. As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world. I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in. 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. When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they? have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street. They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort. I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer? Books are the mirrors of the soul. Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title. I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual. 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. 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... The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. 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. I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream. I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky. Why are women... So much more interesting to men than men are to women? When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm. It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface.

Virginia Woolf

1882 - 1941