Virginia Woolf

Some people go to priests, others to poetry, I to my friends.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.

I can only note that the past is beautiful, because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

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

I read the book of Job last night I don't think God comes out well in it.

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent, and he is never bored and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

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

This is an important book the critic assumes because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

It is fatal to be a man or woman, pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them, we may make them, take the mould of arm or breast but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births, they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common of thinking by the body of the people so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.