“Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”
Men
“Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.”
AloneAll Quotes by Virginia Woolf
“Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.”
Money“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?”
Education“Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.”
Experience“The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.”
Romantic“It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
Nature“When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.”
Amazing“To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.”
Freedom“Masterpieces are not single and solitary births they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
Experience“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
Truth“The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.”
Truth“This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.”
War“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
Money“It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”
Age“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
Time“Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.”
Power“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
History“It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”
Dreams“The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
Beauty“For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?”
Alone