Virginia Woolf

What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself- a voice answering a voice.

Does Nature supplement what man advanced? Or does she complete what he began?

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.

It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities?

Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.

Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?

Would there be trees if we didn't see them?

Whenever you see a board up with "Trespassers will be prosecuted," trespass at once.

Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.

To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world.

Altogether, the task of estimating the length of human life is beyond our capacity, for directly we say that it is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.

But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them.

I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.

Let us not take for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

There are moments when one can neither think nor feel, she thought, and if one can neithre feel nor think, where's one?

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

If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women.

It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality.

What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.

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

Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.