Quotes from Virginia Woolf

A whole lifetime was too short to bring out … the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning …

To let the light of the world flood back-to say this has not happened! But why turn one's head hither and thither? This is the truth. This is fact.

Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters, defilers, the writers of false books, faked books, books that fill the air with decay and disease?

And of course she enjoyed life immensely. It was her nature to enjoy. Anyhow there was no bitterness in her; none of that sense of moral virtue which is so repulsive in good women. She enjoyed practically everything. If you walked with her in Hyde Park now it was a bed of tulips, now a child in a perambulator, now some absurd little drama she made up on the spur of the moment.

Bring those parcels,' he said, nodding his head at the things Nancy had done up for them to take to the Lighthouse. 'The parcels for the Lighthouse men,' he said. He rose and stood in the bow of the boat, very straight and tall, for all the world, James thought, as if he were saying: 'There is no God,' and Cam thought, as if he were leaping into space, and they both rose to follow him as he sprang, lightly like a young man, holding his parcel, on to the rock

Possibly the greatest good requires the existence of a slave class.

George Eliot makes us share their lives, not in a spirit of condescension or of curiosity, but in a spirit of sympathy. She is no satirist....But she gathers in her large grasp a great bunch of the main elements of human nature and groups them loosely together with a tolerant understanding which, as one finds upon re-reading, has not only kept her figures fresh and free, but has given them an unexpected hold upon our laughter and tears.

Habits gradually change the face of one's life as time changes one's physical face; & one does not know it.

I see it all. I feel it all. I am inspired. My eyes fill with tears. Yet even as I feel this. I lash my frenzy higher and higher. It foams. It becomes artificial, insincere. Words and words and words, how they gallop - how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot fly with them, scattering women and string bags. There is some flaw in me - some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity

Rich people, for example, are often angry because they suspect that the poor want to seize their wealth.

Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder.

The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.