It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done. - (Woolf, Virginia - Action)

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them. - (Woolf, Virginia - Adulthood)

If we didn't live adventurously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged. - (Woolf, Virginia - Adventure)

One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph. - (Woolf, Virginia - Adversity)

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency. - (Woolf, Virginia - Age and Aging)

Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are. - (Woolf, Virginia - Age and Aging)

At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials. - (Woolf, Virginia - Age and Aging)

These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism. - (Woolf, Virginia - Age and Aging)

Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street. - (Woolf, Virginia - Apathy)

Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England. - (Woolf, Virginia - Aristocracy)

Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves. - (Woolf, Virginia - Autobiography)

What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment. - (Woolf, Virginia - Automobiles)

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. - (Woolf, Virginia - Awareness)

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly. - (Woolf, Virginia - Banality)

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders. - (Woolf, Virginia - Biography)