QUOTES BY VIRGINIA WOOLF

by

“To enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose.”

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

“As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well if one has not dined well.”

“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out, and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”

“I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.”

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

“The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.”

“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”

“For it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”

“The beauty of the world… has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”

“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”

“It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.”

“The only way to endure existence is to forget purpose.”

“I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”

“It is vain to expect a well-balanced society from persons who have not a well-balanced mind.”

“The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths.”

“Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.”

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”

“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”