Virginia Woolf Quotes

Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are - hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.

The trouble is, I just don't know if I'm too human or not human enough.

What am I? Do I know? I am a man: quite simply, a 'breather.'

I don't know what I am. And it's not important.

When I wasn't working I didn't know what to do with myself and sort of didn't exist, in a way, when I wasn't working, so I was like two different people. I am not like that anymore.

Nothing is stranger to man than his own image.

Obviously the idea of being human is a very human idea.

She wondered what she thought of herself, and came to the realization that she felt mostly indifference towards her entire life.

What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.

What is man that his welfare be considered? An ape who chatters of kinship with the archangels while he very filthily digs for groundnuts. And yet I perceive that this same man is a maimed God. He is condemned under penalty to measure eternity with an hourglass and infinity with a yardstick and what is more, he very nearly does it.

Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes.

Man cannot bear his own portrait. The image of his limits and his own determinacy exasperates him, drives him mad.

I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.

We're here, there, not here, not there, swirling like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the rights of the universe. Being important, being nothing, being caught in lives of our own making that we never wanted. Breaking out, trying again, wondering why the past comes with us, wondering how to talk about the past at all.

It's very odd, being older, because in a way it's hard to own the past, even.

I was never young. Whoever I was then is dead. That's more of your quills. I don't want a hide full, thanks. I have always figured that you die each day and and each day is a is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you have died a couple thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand.

You can't escape your face.

I have a very healthy dose of scepticism towards what identity is and what personas are, maybe because of my life journey. Identity is something so malleable.

The difference between kitties and humans is that we are aware of our mortal condition, and the burden of consciousness is to evoke and embody and explore the coordinates of our condition.

Nobody else can tell you what you are.

I don't even know who I am. All I know is that I am the sibling, daughter, sister, the friend of somebody, and I need to know who I am outside of that.

There's who you think you are and who you want to be, and then who you actually are.

I'm a different girl almost every time I look in the mirror.

I've never thought of myself in terms of an identity. I'm always baffled when I encounter someone who gives the impression about being confident about a particular defined identity.

I've spent my entire life trying to figure out why I was different than everybody else. Why is my voice so deep? Why am I so muscular?