Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Like all very handsome men who die tragically, he left not so much a character behind him as a legend. Youth and death shed a halo through which it is difficult to see a real face.

Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified.

As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.

Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.

for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge

When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.

Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.

I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.

Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence

I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun.

To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!