1,646 Quotes by Virginia Woolf

As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

I am extremely happy walking on the downs...I like to have space to spread my mind out in.

But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.

It is much more important to be oneself than anything else.

This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works

When the white arm rests upon the knee it is a triangle; now it is upright - a column; now a fountain, falling. It makes no sign, it does not beckon, it does not see us. Behind it roars the sea. It is beyond our reach. Yet there I venture. There I go to replenish my emptiness, to stretch my nights and fill them fuller and fuller with dreams. And for a second even now, even here, I reach my object and say, “Wander no more. All is trial and make-believe. Here is the end.

Either I shall find it, or I shall not find it. I examine my note-case. I look in all my pockets. These are the things that forever interrupt the process upon which I am eternally engaged of finding some perfect phrase that fits this moment exactly.

I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.