1,646 Quotes by Virginia Woolf

the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason...

We have been taking into our mouths the bodies of dead birds.

No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. (...) It is not love of truth but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes parish desire the downfall of parish. Each seeks peace of mind and subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and the exaltation of virtue.

In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.

The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.

I want to raise up the magic world all round me and live strongly and quietly there.

What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! (...) I think I could happily live here & read forever.

This idea struck me: the army is the body : I am the brain. Thinking is my fighting. (15 May 1940)

A wet day. And I am glad of the rain, because I have talked too much.