Quotes from Virginia Woolf

before parting that night we agreed that the objects of life were to produce good people and good books.

For nothing [...] is more heavenly than to resist and to yield; to yield and to resist.

If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy.

But I was thinking; feeling; living; those two lives that the two halves symbolized with the intensity, the muffled intensity, which a butterfly or moth feels when with its sticky tremulous legs and antennae it pushes out of the chrysalis and emerges and sits quivering beside the broken case for a moment; its wings still creased; its eyes dazzled, incapable of flight.

The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously.

There can be no doubt, I thought, pushing aside the newspaper, that our mean lives, unsightly as they are, put on splendour and have meaning only under the eyes of love

She had done the usual trick - been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst were between men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere.

Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears.

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.

There was a serenity about him always that had the look of innocence, when, technically, the word was no longer applicable.

We scarcely want to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.