VIRGINIA WOOLF

"He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life."

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

"And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one."

"I will go down with my colours flying."

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

"Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us."

"Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night."

"Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust."

"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others."

"But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful."

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

"Marvelous are the innocent."

"I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world."

"In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us."

"I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful."

"She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day."

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

"It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning."

"But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people."

"I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life."

"Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure."

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

"The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman."

"The depths of the sea are only water after all."

"Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth."

"Intimacy is a difficult art."

"We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods."

"Love had a thousand shapes."

"It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels."

"I feel all shadows of the universe multiplied deep inside my skin."

"Illness is a part of every human being's experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals."

"I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun."

"I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me."

"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."

"Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea."

"I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual."

"A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age."

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life."

"Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence."

"I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky."

"It was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy."

"I like going from one lighted room to another, such is my brain to me; lighted rooms."

"She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through."

"I like to have space to spread my mind out in."

"To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is, at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away."

"To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves."