1,646 Quotes by Virginia Woolf

Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I’ve read and what I haven’t read.

Tom’s great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face – as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; and thought.

I got out this diary and read, as one always reads one’s own writing; with a kind of guilty intensity.

That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library.

They had been written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth.

They start the day confident, braced, believing themselves desired at Miss Smith’s tea party; they say to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they speak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have had such profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious notes in the margin of the private mind.

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.

And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is a woman’s whole existence...

Whenever you see a board up with “Trespassers will be prosecuted,” trespass at once.