1,646 Quotes by Virginia Woolf

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again – as I always am when I write.

So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball.

If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? – not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.

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.

Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins – of happiness and unhappiness.

To sit and contemplate – to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where and what you are.

It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole. This wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together.

A million candles burnt in him without his being at the trouble of lighting a single one.