Virginia Woolf

I am reading the life of Queen Victoria. She was a very stupid woman.

Life is a dream. It is a dream from which we are all trying to wake up.

The truth is, I am a very difficult woman to live with.

I mean, what is a woman? Certainly not a man. The only way to define a woman is to define her as not a man.

To write a good letter, you must have a good mind.

I am a woman, and I have a right to my own opinions.

The only way to be happy is to love your enemies.

I am not afraid of death, I am afraid of life.

I have lost my temper more often in the last year than in my whole life before.

The great artist is the man who can make the most profound statement in the fewest words.

I detest the actively good. It is the passively good who do the least harm.

As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machines — always buzzing, humming, soaring, diving, and then buried in a bog. And the only way in which I can manage it and make it work is by turning off the head and letting it go its own way.

I feel a thousand capacities in me which have never been used.

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

I mean, what is a woman? Certainly not the jingle and glitter of a dress, not the texture of a skin, nor the shine of a hair.

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

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 truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their courage. I like their completeness. I like their absence of humbug.