Virginia Woolf

There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

If one could be friendly with women what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

Yet it is true poetry is delicious, the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

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

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing humming soaring roaring diving and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action, yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.

Somewhere everywhere now hidden now apparent in what ever is written down is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him are we idly occupied?

The eyes of others our prisons, their thoughts our cages.

Let a man get up and say 'Behold, this is the truth' and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching, a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning it satisfies the senses amazingly.

This is not writing at all. Indeed I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether if I knew what I meant.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it, it must draw its curtain round us but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

The older one grows the more one likes indecency.

Fiction is like a spider's web attached ever so slightly perhaps but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

Mental fight means thinking against the current not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

The poet gives us his essence but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

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

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

Indeed I would venture to guess that Anon who wrote so many poems without signing them was often a woman.

Once conform once do what other people do because they do it and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness, dull callous and indifferent.

I want the concentration and the romance and the worlds all glued together fused glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

Almost any biographer if he respects facts can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact, the fertile fact, the fact that suggests and engenders.

I would venture to guess that Anon who wrote so many poems without signing them was often a woman.

This soul or life within us by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour, riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty and the feeble wrong because of weakness.

If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

Every secret of a writer's soul every experience of his life every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

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

The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish has two edges one of laughter one of anguish cutting the heart asunder.

You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort.

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.

If you insist upon fighting to protect me or 'our' country let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share, to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.

It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged, life is a luminous halo a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.