35 Times Virginia Woolf Eloquently Expressed Our Deepest Thoughts.

“I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“I am born entire, out of hatred, out of discord.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“She would not say of any one in the world that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“Clear-cut and unequivocal am I too. Yet a vast inheritance of experience is packed in me. I have lived thousands of years. I am like a worm that has eaten its way through the wood of a very old oak beam. But now I am compact; now I am gathered together this fine morning.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that figure who is coming, and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one’s friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to…”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“Oh the torture of never being left alone! I find it impossible to disentangle myself from those instincts, affections, passions, attachments…which bound me…from the first moment of consciousness to other people. I need solitude; I need to feel I belong to myself.’”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.ca

“It is true that the surface may have some connection with the depths, but if we are to help you to prevent war we must try to penetrate deeper beneath the skin.”

— Virginia Woolf, ebooks.adelaide.edu.au

“She is rather like the winter sun–her ruddy edges slightly blurred.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and fall and rise again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet. Boats and youth passing and distant trees, ‘the falling fountains of the pendent trees.’ I see it all. I…”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“Lord, how utterly disgusting life is! What dirty tricks it plays us, one moment free; the next, this.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“Tears rose slowly in her eyes and stood there, brimming but contained. The tears of some profound emotion, happiness, grief, renunciation; an emotion so complex in its nature that to express it was impossible.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“It seemed to her that there was something amateurish in bringing romantic love into touch with a perfectly straightforward friendship.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“The birds sang passionate songs addressed to one ear only and then stopped. Bubbling and chuckling they carried little bits of straw and twig to the dark knots in the higher branches of the trees. Gilt and purpled they perched in the garden, where cones of laburnum and purple shook down gold and lil…”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“Oh, this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. Now my body thaws; I am unsealed, I am incandescent.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I’m never not thinking of you.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying–what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must simply say what one felt.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“Some people go to priests, others to poetry, I to my friends.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.”

— Virginia Woolf, goodreads.com

“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was o…”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, t…”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“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!”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time… I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.”

— Virginia Woolf, brainpickings.org

“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“–in other words, how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one’s kind.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com