1
It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this -- and much more than this is true -- why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us--why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him. Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love.Virginia Woolf
2
Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.Virginia Woolf
3
When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.Virginia Woolf
4
They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought[.]Virginia Woolf
5
I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.Virginia Woolf
6
Anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.Virginia Woolf
7
Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?Virginia Woolf
8
What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?Virginia Woolf
9
It is no use trying to sum people up.Virginia Woolf
10
The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks–so it sounded.Virginia Woolf
11
The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?Virginia Woolf
12
But language is wine upon his lipsVirginia Woolf
13
Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.Virginia Woolf
14
Kind old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always go to a good man, they say[.]Virginia Woolf
15
Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.Virginia Woolf
16
He is precisely the young man to fall headlong in love and repent it for the rest of his life.Virginia Woolf
17
It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.Virginia Woolf
18
Anyhow, whether undergraduate or shop boy, man or woman, it must come as a shock about the age of twenty–the world of the elderly–thrown up in such black outline upon what we are; upon the reality; the moors and Byron; the sea and the lighthouse; the sheep’s jaw with the yellow teeth in it; upon the obstinate irrepressible conviction which makes youth so intolerably disagreeable–“ I am what I am, and intend to be it, ” for which there will be no form in the world unless Jacob makes one for himself. The Plumers will try to prevent him from making it. Wells and Shaw and the serious sixpenny weeklies will sit on its head.Virginia Woolf
19
No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion.Virginia Woolf
20
They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought, and no doubt if you are of a mystical tendency, consolation, and even explanation, shower down from the unbroken surface.Virginia Woolf