Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is androgynous, that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to their interpretation. Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to make these distinctions than the single-sexed mind. He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.

There is something I want-something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper without knowing quite what it was, with her eyes closed.

when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.

I like observing people. I like looking at things.

I is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being.

Habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play.

I dance. I ripple. I am thrown over you like a net of light. I lie quivering flung over you.

When I heard you cry I followed you, and saw you put down your handkerchief, screwed up, with its rage, with its hate, knotted in it.

Some people go to priests; others to poetry...I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken.

It is curious how, at every crisis, some phrase which does not fit insists upon coming to the rescue--the penalty of living in an old civilisation with a notebook.

Orlando was unaccountably disappointed. She had thought of literature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse) as something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift as lightning; something errant, incalculable, abrupt, and behold, literature was an elderly gentleman in a grey suit talking about duchesses.

I like reading my own writing. It seems to fit me closer than it did before.