Virginia Woolf
You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort.
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradles. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself.
Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?
Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.
When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
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.
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty. There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail.
Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face - as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; and thought.
To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.
Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.
Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.
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.
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.
Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.
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.