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“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
Virginia Woolf20 likes
48 quotes and counting. Scroll to wander through 374,000+ literary moments.
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
“I am rooted, but I flow.”
“Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.”
“Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”
“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
“Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.”
“anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.”
“By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”
“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”
“Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.”
“He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”
“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
“Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”
“For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”
“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
“I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?”
“The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.”
“For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.”
“The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.”
“The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.”
“To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.”
“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.”
“A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.”
“Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.”
“It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.”
“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?”
“Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.”
“As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”
“Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!”
“Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.”
“It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.”
“It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.”
“The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.”
“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?”
“Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.”
“The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.”
“For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.”
“Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.”
“Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.”
“All the time she writing the world had continued.”
“Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.”
“He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.”
“The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be, and deserves fuller investigation.”
“When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.”