1,646 Quotes by Virginia Woolf

Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life?

This fiddling and drifting and not impressing oneself upon anything – this always refraining and fingering and cutting things up into little jokes and facetiousness – that's what's so annihilating. Yet given little money, little looks, no special gift – what can one do? How could one battle? How could one leap on the back of life and wring its scruff?

The vision of her own personality, of herself as a real everlasting thing, different from anything else, unmergeable, like the sea or the wind, flashed into Rachel's mind, and she became profoundly excited at the thought of living.

Because it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels, he thought...

Yes, our old age is not going to be sunny orchard drowse. By shutting down the fire curtain, though, I find I can live in the moment; which is good; why yield a moment to regret or envy or worry? Why indeed? (24 December 1940)

When you are silent you are again beautiful.

No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion.

For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.

The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.