Adeline Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
Here is a collection of Virginia Woolf most famous quotes: Virginia Woolf Quotes about love, beauty, life, feminism, women, freedom and emancipation. Quotes and Sayings on writing, books, library, history, stories, love, poetry, emotion, women, inequality, self love, solitude, truth and misogyny by Virginia Woolf.
Virginia Woolf Quotes and Sayings
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
Books are the mirrors of the soul.
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.
Why are women.... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.
Language is wine upon the lips.
I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.
Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.
If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?
Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?
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.
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, 'Consume me'.
There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.
No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.
Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.
If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?
I am rooted, but I flow.
For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
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.
We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.
Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.
It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.
A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.
That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.
I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.
All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.
Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
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.
Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.
It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.
I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.
To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.
The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
I have lost friends, some by death... others by sheer inability to cross the street.
This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.
Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.
Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.
I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.
Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.
She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.
This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.
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...
It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.
He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.
The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.
I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
What does the brain matter compared with the heart?
One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort.
For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.
I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.
Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.
I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.
Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?
It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.
I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.
He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.
There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.
When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.
One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?
It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.
I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun.
For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?
Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.
A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.
Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.
The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.
I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky.
I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.
"I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; "the things people don't say."
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.
Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.
I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer?
It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!
Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you.
For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.
I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore.
And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.
They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort.
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
The beauty of the world.... has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn't pull the trigger?
I really don't advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married.
I want someone to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy - to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits.
Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read.
I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.
About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.
To love makes one solitary.
Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one's own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.
I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.
Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface.
Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty - it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life - froze it.
My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?
Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure.
The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.
I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older.
It was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy.
Who shall measure the heat and violence of a poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?
He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.
No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.
I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.
I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.
It is no use trying to sum people up.
By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.
"But when we sit together, close," said Bernard, "we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory."
Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.
So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.
But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.
Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying - what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.
Yes, I deserve a spring I owe nobody nothing.
Life stand still here.
The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.
When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.
I am not one and simple, but complex and many.
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.
Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.
No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.
Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are.
Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent.
What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.
She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.
For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.
We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie asleep.
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.
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.
I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.
Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.
Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall.
The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.
Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?
And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover.
The moment was all; the moment was enough.
Never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having.
Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned - in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?
All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.
First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
For it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge
All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.
Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?
The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.
Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit.
I prefer men to cauliflowers.
What if I told you I'm incapable of tolerating my own heart?
For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.
Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins - of happiness and unhappiness.
Anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.
These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom.
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.
To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.
I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else.
He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.
Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.
It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.
But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful.
But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.
Clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.
A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her.
Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.
The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
Her heart was made of liquid sunsets.
It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.
My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.
But nevertheless, the fact remained, it was almost impossible to dislike anyone if one looked at them.
Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing.
I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.
Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?
Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.
Some we know to be dead even though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through all the forms of life; other are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six.
I am drowning, my dear, in seas of fire.
I think sometimes I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn.
Still, life had a way of adding day to day.
Her eyes are pure stars, and her fingers, if they touch you, freeze you to the bone.
It is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people.... Think of things in themselves.
And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.