Virginia Woolf

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.

The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath.

I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.

No, I'm not clever. I've always cared more for people than for ideas.

For nothing was simply one thing.

We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

We read Charlotte Bronte not for exquisite observation of character - her characters are vigorous and elementary; not for comedy - hers is grim and crude; not for a philosophic view of life - hers is that of a country parson's daughter; but for her poetry. Probably that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering personality, so that, as we say in real life, they have only to open the door to make themselves felt.

Why have I so little control? It is the case of much waste and pain in my life.

Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections.

Life would split apart without letters.

The truer the facts the better the fiction.

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.

A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life

A light here required a shadow there.

And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees _x000D_ and changing leaves.

The depths of the sea are only water after all.

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination.

Her life-that was the only chance she had-the short season between two silences.

It is probable that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man.