[Adeline] Virginia Woolf, (1882-1941), English novelist and critic Quotes

What is meant by "reality"? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable -- now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats -- and one always secretes too much jelly.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery -- always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

To make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action.

I have lost friends, some by death ... Others by sheer inability to cross the street.

Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn, dropped face -- as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding and thought.

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

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, calloused, and indifferent.

If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge, are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? -- not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... thers through sheer inability to cross the street.