Virginia Woolf Quotes

And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.

The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets sa...

Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.

For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole per...

For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how man...

Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?

She was married, true; but if one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If ...

The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodg...

All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.

Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us war...

Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what r...

The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer e...

Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the busine...

Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever ...

the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string

But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctual...

She had thought of literature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse) ...

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another.

He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and be...

What has seven editions (the book had already gone into no less) got to do with the value of it? Was...

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural...

He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant die...

There were mountains; there were valleys; there were streams. She climbed the mountains; roamed the ...

The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still ...

All the time she writing the world had continued.

Buy for me from the King's own kennels, the finest elk hounds of the Royal strain, male and female. ...

Hail, happiness, then, and after happiness, hail not those dreams which bloat the sharp image as spo...

Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.

She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight which now met her eyes. There was the...

Nancy waded out to her own rocks and searched her own pools and let that couple look after themselve...

By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dr...

He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in th...

That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by c...

She liked getting hold of some book... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privac...

What is nobler," she mused, turning over the photographs, "than to be a woman to whom every one turn...

She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like imper...

But we-' she glanced at him as if to ascertain his position, 'we see each other only now and then-''...

But it would have been a surprise, not only to katherine herself, if some magic watch could have tak...

I don't care much whether I ever get to know anything - but I want to work out something in figures ...

Because it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels, he thought...

This susceptibility to impressions had been his undoing, no doubt. Still at his age he had, like a b...

Here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?

These hotels are not consoling places. Far from it. Any number of people had hung up their hats on t...

Clarissa had a theory in those days - they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people h...

(June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young. Messag...

It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.

But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bo...

and it was the moment between six and seven when every flower-roses, carnations, irises, lilac-glows...

for she could never think of anything to say to Clarissa, though she liked her. She had lots of fine...

Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally ...

What does the brain matter compared with the heart?

Far rather would she that he were dead! She could not sit beside him when he stared so and did not s...

But it would have been a surprise, not only to Katherine herself, if some magic watch could have tak...

What she liked was simply life. "That's what i did it for," she said, speaking aloud to life... Coul...

When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.

The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; n...

He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on...

It was love, she thought, love that never clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians...

As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, ...

Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be...

By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, ...

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at ...

A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life.

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

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order

That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if...

The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour once it lodges in the queer e...

The great cathedral space which was childhood.

To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, an...

He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegat...

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with...

Even the names of the books gave me food for thought.

Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise...

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

Are we not acceptable, moon? Are we not lovely sitting together here, I in my satin; he in black and...

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest th...

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it mu...

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

Pretty Stones

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as w...

The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pie...

Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to t...

He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now again...

All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense ...

It was his power, his gift, suddenly to shed all superfluities, to shrink and diminish so that he lo...

I am extremely happy walking on the downs...I like to have space to spread my mind out in.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written ...

You send a girl to school in order to make friends - the right sort.

I’ll be blasted’, he said, ‘if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Ni...

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

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written...

He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the spac...

As for my next book I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown...

For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how man...