Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Had they not been taken, she asked, to circuses when they were children? Never, he answered, as if she asked the very thing he wanted; had been longing all these days to say, how they did not go to circuses.

As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm.

Children never forget injustice. They forgive heaps of things grown-up people mind; but that sin is the unpardonable sin.

Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one!

You send a girl to school in order to make friends - the right sort.

Even the names of the books gave me food for thought.

Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.

Oh, to awake from dreaming! Look, there is the chest of drawers. Let me pull myself out of this waters. But they heap themselves on me; they sweep me between their great shoulders; I am turned; I am tumbled; I am stretched, among these long lights, these long waves, these endless paths, with people pursuing, pursuing.

I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me

There was in Lily a thread of something; a flare of something; something of her own Mrs. Ramsay liked very much indeed, but no man would, she feared. [...] He was not in love of course; it was one of those unclassified affections of which there are so many.

He was afraid he did not understand beauty apart form human beings.

The streets seemed to chafe the very air...and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved.