Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.

What she liked was simply life. 'That's what I do it for', she said, speaking aloud, to life.

It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad!

It passed through his mind that if he missed this chance of talking to Katharine, he would have to face an enraged ghost, when he was alone in his room again, demanding an explanation of his cowardly indecision. It was better, on the whole, to risk present discomfiture than to waste an evening bandying excuses and constructing impossible scenes with this uncompromising section of himself.

How could any Lord have made this world? she asked. With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor.

Nothing happens here except that I write and write, and curse and burn.

But if there are no stories, what end can there be, or what beginning?

In the vast catastrophe of the European war our emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction.

Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her brest buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in her eyes and wind in her hair— he took her bag.

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.