Virginia Woolf Quotes

612 Sourced Quotes

But words have been used too often; touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street. The words we seek hang close to the tree. We come at dawn and find them sweet beneath the leaf.

Virginia Woolf
Even Morgan seems to me to be based on some hidden rock. Talking of Proust and Lawrence he said he'd prefer to be Lawrence; but much rather would be himself. He is aloof, serene, a snob, he says, reading masterpieces only.

Virginia Woolf
That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

Virginia Woolf
I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk [sic] treasure

Virginia Woolf
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees
and changing leaves.

Virginia Woolf
So that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again...

Virginia Woolf
The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case [the woman writer's] not indifference but hostility. The world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, Write? What's the good of your writing?

Virginia Woolf
The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.

Virginia Woolf
When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument.

Virginia Woolf
I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.

Virginia Woolf
The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire.

Virginia Woolf
Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.

Virginia Woolf
I was thrown off ignominiously... I'm so stiff at this moment that if one wrote letters with one's legs, I couldn't write this.

Virginia Woolf
Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

Virginia Woolf
Morgan has the artist's mind; he says the simple things that clever people don't say; I find him the best of critics for that reason. Suddenly out comes the obvious thing that one has overlooked.

Virginia Woolf
In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.

Virginia Woolf
"What is this romance?" she mused.
"Ah, that's the question. I've never come across a definition that satisfied me, though there are some very good ones"—he glanced in the direction of his books.
"It's not altogether knowing the other person, perhaps—it's ignorance," she hazarded.
"Some authorities say it's a question of distance—romance in literature, that is—"
"Possibly, in the case of art. But in the case of people it may be—" she hesitated.

Virginia Woolf
One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy.

Virginia Woolf
But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the teashop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him- he could not feel. He could reason; he could read, Dante for example, quite easily…he could add up his bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then- that he could not feel.

Virginia Woolf
As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better.

Virginia Woolf
Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

Virginia Woolf
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.

Virginia Woolf
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. He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip past them in a kind of dream.

Virginia Woolf
Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.

Virginia Woolf
Why does one write these books after all? The drudgery, the misery, the grind, are forgotten every time; and one launches another, and it seems sheer joy and buoyancy.

Virginia Woolf
I got out this diary and read, as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity.

Virginia Woolf
To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.

Virginia Woolf
If the best of one's feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?

Virginia Woolf
Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves.

Virginia Woolf
All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are sides, and it is necessary for one side to beat another side.

Virginia Woolf