Virginia Woolf

“The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.”

“Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.”

“the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string”

“I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in themselves.”

“To love makes one solitary.”

“How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?”

“It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.”

“They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did.”

“Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.”

“I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said.But he never liked anyone who--our friends,' said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to marry her.Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was more unhappy than I've ever been since, he thought. And as if in truth he were sitting there on the terrace he edged a little towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it; let it fall. There above them it hung, that moon. She too seemed to be sitting with him on the terrace, in the moonlight.”

“He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.”

“When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.”

“This idea struck me: the army is the body : I am the brain. Thinking is my fighting. (15 May 1940)”

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

“Your image has receded till it is like the thinnest shadow of the old moon... a thin silver edge appeared, and now you hang like a sickle over my life.”

“Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.”

“When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.”

“It seems comfortable to sink down on a sofa in a corner, to look, to listen. Then it happens that two figures standing with their backs against the window appear against the branches of a spreading tree. With a shock of emotion one feels 'There are figures without features robed in beauty'. In the pause that follows while the ripples spread, the girl to whom one should be talking says to herself, 'He is old'. But she is wrong. It is not age; it is that a drop has fallen; another drop. Time has given the arrangement another shake. Out we creep from the arch of the currant leaves, out into a wider world. The true order of things – this is our perpetual illusion – is now apparent. Thus in a moment, in a drawing-room, our life adjusts itself to the majestic march of day across the sky.”

“It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”

“Kind old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always go to a good man, they say[.]”