Virginia Woolf Quotes

612 Sourced Quotes

Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!

Virginia Woolf
Very much screwed in the head by trying to get Roger's marriage chapter into shape; and also warmed by L. saying last night that he was fonder of me than I of him. A discussion as to which would mind the other's death most. He said he depended more upon our common life than I did. He gave the garden as an instance. He said I live more in a world of my own. I go for long walks alone. So we argued. I was very happy to think I was so much needed. Its strange how seldom one feels this: yet 'life in common' is an immense reality.

Virginia Woolf
You have a touch in letter writing that is beyond me. Something unexpected, like coming round a corner in a rose garden and finding it still daylight.

Virginia Woolf
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.

Virginia Woolf
A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.

Virginia Woolf
What is meant by reality? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable - now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying

Virginia Woolf
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.

Virginia Woolf
Despairing of human relationships (people were so difficult), she often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her.

Virginia Woolf
I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.

Virginia Woolf
To make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action.

Virginia Woolf
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.

Virginia Woolf
First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.

Virginia Woolf
His eyes were bright, and, indeed, he scarcely knew whether they held dreams or realities...and in five minutes she had filled the shell of the old dream with the flesh of life...

Virginia Woolf
One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.

Virginia Woolf
I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.

Virginia Woolf
Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred.

Virginia Woolf
Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.

Virginia Woolf
I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens.

Virginia Woolf
They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort.

Virginia Woolf
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.

Virginia Woolf
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

Virginia Woolf
Jealousy... survives every other passion of mankind...

Virginia Woolf
Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?

Virginia Woolf
When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.

Virginia Woolf
It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.

Virginia Woolf
Old emotions like old families have intermarried and have many connections.

Virginia Woolf
You would get longer livelier and more frequent letters from me, if it weren't for the Christian religion. How that bell tolling at the end of the garden, dum dum, dum dum, annoys me! Why is Christianity so insistent and so sad?

Virginia Woolf
Travelers are much at the mercy of phrases... vast generalizations formulate in their exposed brains.

Virginia Woolf
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.

Virginia Woolf
I read the book of Job last night. I don't think God comes well out of it.

Virginia Woolf