Virginia Woolf

Yes, I was thinking: we live without a future. That's what's queer: with our noses pressed to a closed door.

I am fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall.

I am haunted by the two contradictions. That is the hammer stroke that wakes me in the early morning.

I feel like a cucumber that has been pickled.

I am not a very simple person.

I am a great deal interested suddenly in my book. I want to bring in the despicableness of people like Ott. I want to give the slipperiness of the soul.

I am not very bright. My mind is like a rusty weathercock.

I am like a plant that has been overwatered.

I am in a state of glory; and calm; and something like wisdom.

I am really a novelist; but I have been sidetracked.

I am so ugly, so mediocre, so undistinguished.

I am like a piece of driftwood.

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

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

I am reading Six of One by Mrs. W. K. Clifford. It is about a girl who falls in love with her brother. She is quite mad, but then so are all women.

The greatest writers are the most androgynous.

Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

It is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been impressed upon them by the other sex.

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.

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