1,646 Quotes by Virginia Woolf

It is the privilege of loneliness; in privacy one may do as one chooses. One might weep if no one saw.

He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds—that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things.

Sometimes lately it had seemed to her that, except for Elizabeth, her food was all that she lived for; her comforts; her dinner, her tea; her hot-water bottle at night.

... it is the privilege of loneliness; in privacy one may do as one chooses.

Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much as it used to look years ago.

. . . there were masses of pictures she had not seen; however, Lily Briscoe reflected, perhaps it was better not to see pictures: they only made one hopelessly discontented with one’s own work.

Yes, I deserve a spring–I owe nobody nothing.

the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string

One does not love a place the less because one has suffered in it.