Virginia Woolf

"Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent."

"To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away..."

"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life."

"No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes"

"Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others."

"I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."

"Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?"

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

"When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?"

"Arrange whatever pieces come your way."

"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."

"The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."

"If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people."

"Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends."

"Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure"

"Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack."

"As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world."

"By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream"