Virginia Woolf Life Quotations

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.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

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.

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.

Life's bare as a bone.

So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life, and whether this is living.

Like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life.

The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.

How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?

But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.

A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.

There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.