"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
— Virginia Woolf

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life."
— Virginia Woolf

"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."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?"
— Virginia Woolf

"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."
— Virginia Woolf

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. "
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"As a woman, I have no country. As a woman my country is the world. "
— Virginia Woolf

"When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?"
— Virginia Woolf

"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.”"
— Virginia Woolf

"The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages."
— Virginia Woolf

"Books are the mirrors of the soul."
— Virginia Woolf (Between the Acts)

"If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people"
— Virginia Woolf

"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."
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

"The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity. "
— Virginia Woolf

"Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy."
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

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

"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. "
— Virginia Woolf

"Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man, at twice its natural size. "
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. "
— Virginia Woolf

"All extremes of feeling are allied with madness."
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

"Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence."
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

"I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual"
— Virginia Woolf

"I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in."
— Virginia Woolf

"She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day."
— Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)

"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? "
— Virginia Woolf

"Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art"
— Virginia Woolf (The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Vol. 4)

"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."
— Virginia Woolf

"The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself. "
— Virginia Woolf

"Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us."
— Virginia Woolf (Jacob's Room)

"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps,
but still attached to life at all four corners."
— Virginia Woolf

"No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own, and Three Guineas)

"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one."
— Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse)

"An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know.

All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was!-that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant . . ."
— Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)

"There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'."
— Virginia Woolf (The Waves)

"But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm."
— Virginia Woolf

"Growing up is loosing some illusions, in order to acquire others."
— Virginia Woolf

"Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read."
— Virginia Woolf (Between the Acts)

"It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface."
— Virginia Woolf

"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, thought the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen."
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

"Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?"
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

"...she took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstacy in the air. Where to begin?--that was the question at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must run; the mark made."
— Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse)

"To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable."
— Virginia Woolf

"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"
— Virginia Woolf

"Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure"
— Virginia Woolf

"Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. "
— Virginia Woolf

"For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way--that is what we look to you to do now."
— Virginia Woolf

"Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next. "
— Virginia Woolf (The Waves)

"Arrange whatever pieces come your way."
— Virginia Woolf