Virginia Woolf Time Quotations

The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published.

Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.

The large shiny black forehead of the first whale was no more than two yards from us when it sank beneath the surface of the water, then we saw the huge blue-black bulk glide quietly under the raft right beneath our feet. It lay there for some time, dark and motionless, and we held our breath as we looked down on the gigantic curved back of a mammal a good deal longer than the raft.

Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections.

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 older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.

I am not so gifted as at one time seemed likely.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.

Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.

At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.

Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.