You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
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Quotes by Virginia Woolf
Explore 28 verified and sourced quotes attributed to Virginia Woolf. Open any quote for its dedicated page, source details and related topics.
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Selected quotes by Virginia Woolf
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
Language is wine upon the lips.
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
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.
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.
For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
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?
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.
It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.
Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.
Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
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.
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.
It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.
Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
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.
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.
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