Virginia Woolf

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.

The connection between dress and war is not far to seek your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

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.

The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

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.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.

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

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.