“And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.”
― Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays

“For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him.”
― Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays

“Viața este ceea ce vezi în ochii oamenilor; viața este ceea ce aceștia învață și, învățând, nu încetează niciodată să fie conștienți de asta, deși încearcă s-o ascundă - ce anume?”
― Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays

“We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others.”
― Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays

“In reading we have to allow the sunken meanings to remain sunken, suggested, not stated; lapsing and flowing into each other like reeds on the bed of a river”
― Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays

“On the subject of rambling (from the essay 'Street haunting'):
The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields.
The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow.
We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeabel after the solitude of one's own room.”
― Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays

“The mind is full of monstrous, hybrid, unmanageable emotions. That the age of the earth is 3,000,000,000 years; that human life lasts but a second; that the capacity of the human mind is nevertheless boundless; that life is infinitely beautiful yet repulsive; that one's fellow creatures are adorable but disgusting; that science and religion have between them destroyed belief; that all bonds of union seem broken, yet some control must exist—it is in this atmosphere of doubt and conflict that writers have now to create, and the fine fabric of a lyric is no more fitted to contain this point of view than a rose leaf to envelop the rugged immensity of a rock.”
― Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays