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Legacy
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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.
-Virginia Woolf
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Libraries
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I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.
-Virginia Woolf
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Life
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The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.
-Virginia Woolf
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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.
-Virginia Woolf
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So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life, and whether this is living.
-Virginia Woolf
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Literary
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Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.
-Virginia Woolf
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Love
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For love... has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together
-Virginia Woolf
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Madness
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-Virginia Woolf, Letter, December 28, 1932
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Maturity
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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.
-Virginia Woolf
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Men & Women
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Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
-Virginia Woolf
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Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
-Virginia Woolf
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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?
-Virginia Woolf
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Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is very opposite of what it is above....Every secret of a writer
-Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, ch. 4 (1928)
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All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are sides and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster a highly ornamental pot. As people mature, they cease to believe in sides or in Headmasters or in highly ornamental pots.
-Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
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It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is, and if an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater service to humanity; and we should have the immense pleasure into the bargain of watching Professor X rush for his measuring-rods to prove himself superior.
-Virginia Woolf
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Military, the
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The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.
-Virginia Woolf
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Mind, the
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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?
-Virginia Woolf
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Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.
-Virginia Woolf
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Opinion
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But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying.
-Virginia Woolf
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Opportunity
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Arrange Whatever pieces come your way.
-Virginia Woolf
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Pain
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On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
-Virginia Woolf
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Peace
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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.
-Virginia Woolf
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People
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The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
-Virginia Woolf
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Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.
-Virginia Woolf
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Perception
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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.
-Virginia Woolf
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Books by and about Virginia Woolf