Virginia Woolf Quotes

My soul is dark with stormy riot: directly traced over to diet.

The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again. No, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one's pocket for another meal.

Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind,Reality's dark dream!I turn from you, and listen to the wind,Which long has raved unnoticed.

Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust, and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime logically should produce but actually does not.

How sick i am! that thought Always comes to me with horror. Is it this strange for everybody? But such fugitive feelings have always been my metier.

She carried a knife inside of herself now, one that was always cutting her. She could feel it every time she swallowed, every time her thoughts strayed from the splendor of the wild.

You cannot escape what you have to deal with inside yourself. It will never bring good things. It will only bring madness.

Doubt is thought's despair; despair is personality's doubt. . . . Doubt and despair . . . belong to completely different spheres; different sides of the soul are set in motion. . . . Despair is an expression of the total personality, doubt only of thought.

But those with shattered souls find it very difficult to speak.

There are materials enough in every man's mind to make a hell there.

Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

I thought that jealousy was an idea. It isn't. It's a pain. But I didn't feel as they do in a Broadway melodrama. I didn't want to kill anybody. I just wanted to die.

But the division in him was a sorrow and a torment, and he became accustomed to it only as one gets used to an unhealed and frequently reopened wound.

It's a most distressing affliction to have a sentimental heart and a skeptical mind.

July 24, 6:03 A.M. The laundry was warm and the rafters were firm, and Michael Holzapfel jumped from the chair as if it were a cliff... Michael Holzapfel knew what he was doing. He killed himself for wanting to live.

A monster lies in wait in me,a stew of wounds and misery.But fiercer still in life and limb,the me that lies in wait in him

The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.

Most self-laceration is more noisy than painful.

From this haunting feeling of being not wanted, which remained a recurrent haunt through life, I found two ways of escape, both of which in changing form also persisted. One was the invention of gods, the other was personal efficiency in work.

I told myself that if I didn't care, this wouldn't have hurt so much - surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn't a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.

My soul is my great asset and my great misfortune.

[Neurotics are] torn by inner conflicts ... Every neurotic ... is at war with himself.

When you were straight, evil thoughts and memories came pouring up out of the darkness inside you; buzzing black flies clinging to the insides of your skull.

The soul has more diseases than the body.