Virginia Woolf
Remember if you marry for beauty, thou bindest thyself all thy life for that which perchance, will neither last nor please thee one year: and when thou hast it, it will be to thee of no price at all.
Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.
[Queen Victoria] knew her own mind. But the mind radically commonplace, only its inherited force, and cumulative sense of power, making it remarkable.
Publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the heath of their fame as men are, and speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it.
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.
One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
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.
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.
Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
Never did I read such tosh. As for the first two chapters we will let them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th - merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bookboy at Claridges.
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?
Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.
Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.
Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.
Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.
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.