Virginia Woolf Quotes

Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.

My search not only failed, but I convinced myself that all those who had searched like myself had failed also, and come like me to the despairing conviction that the only absolute knowledge man can possess is this—that life is without a meaning.

Then when dusk began to settle he would retrace his steps, back to his own world. And on the way home, a loneliness would always claim his heart. He could never quite get a grip on what it was. It just seemed that whatever lay waiting "out there" was all too vast, too overwhelming for him to possibly ever make a dent in.

What was life asking of me? How could I respond when I didn't know the question?

Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning.

Life would be so wonderful if we only knew what to do with it.

I think there is a part of life that I'm missing.

For a while now I've had this feeling that there's something that I'm supposed to be doing or something that I'm supposed to contribute. I don't know what that is yet, but it's been plaguing me - like I've missed my calling somehow.

I am not a man. I am not a human being inside. I am not that. I don't know what I am, but I am not that.

To live is to feel oneself lost.

She said she was neither happy nor unhappy, and that was why she couldn't go on. Each person knows the extent of their own suffering, or the total absence of meaning in their lives.

...a disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings.

It was one of those times when you can feel the air in a room. Everything stood still. I can remember the T-shirt I was wearing and the bag I was carrying. I don't think I breathed for 15 minutes. It was a devastating moment. They said they wanted me to experience more things. OK. I began contemplating things. Maybe I should take LSD or become a hooker. I left Juilliard and was just meandering and drifting for a while. Thank God I had support from my family and close friends. Bad times.

...you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on

I still don't even know if the sheriff will let me see him. And suppose he did; what then? What do I say to him? Do I know what a man is? Do I know how a man is supposed to die? I'm still trying to find out how a man should live. Am I supposed to tell someone how to die who has never lived?

Life is islands of ecstasy in an ocean of ennui, and after the age of thirty land is seldom seen.

Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.

I guess we often get the deep blues, both of us, and wonder what it all means- the people, the buildings, the day by day things, the waste of time, of ourselves.

Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.

In these years we are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of innumerable human lives wandering about lost in their own labyrinths, through not having anything to which to give themselves.

Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.

I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.

Modern life. Where are we running? Sometimes what we want is not always where we are... Are we alone? Is the real winter inside our hearts? We are all struggling for definition in a world that resists our increase.

Man no longer lives in the beginning--he has lost the beginning. Now he finds he is in the middle, knowing neither the end nor the beginning, and yet knowing that he is in the middle, coming from the beginning and going towards the end. He sees that his life is determined by these two facets, of which he knows only that he does not know them