Virginia Woolf
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
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.
Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. More than anything... it calls for confidence in oneself... And how can we generate this imponderable quality most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself.
It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.
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.
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.
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.
Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will.
Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
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.
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
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?
If we didn't live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.
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?
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.
I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.
Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.