Virginia Woolf Quotes

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For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.

Virginia Woolf
To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.

Virginia Woolf
It was the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind indelibly.

Virginia Woolf
The Reverend C. L. Dodgson had no life. He passed through the world so lightly that he left no print. He melted so passively into Oxford that he is invisible.

Virginia Woolf
I like going from one lighted room to another, such is my brain to me; lighted rooms.

Virginia Woolf
The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering.

Virginia Woolf
She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.

Virginia Woolf
The middlebrow is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige.

Virginia Woolf
It's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.

Virginia Woolf
Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?

Virginia Woolf
More and more I come to loathe any dominion of one over another; any leadership, any imposition of the will.

Virginia Woolf
How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?

Virginia Woolf
Fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science maybe; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

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

Virginia Woolf
She belonged to a different age, but being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable — this interminable life.

Virginia Woolf
Speech is an old torn net, through which the fish escape as one casts it over them.

Virginia Woolf
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 endears.

Virginia Woolf
For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.

Virginia Woolf
Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation.

Virginia Woolf
I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me, here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends.

Virginia Woolf
No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

Virginia Woolf
Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.

Virginia Woolf
The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?

Virginia Woolf
It is the privilege of loneliness; in privacy one may do as one chooses.

Virginia Woolf
There is something I want-something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper without knowing quite what it was, with her eyes closed.

Virginia Woolf
In marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house.

Virginia Woolf
Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, halfway down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waves swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.

Virginia Woolf
But delightful though it is to indulge in righteous indignation, it is misplaced if we agree with the lady's-maid that high birth is a form of congenital insanity, that the sufferer merely inherits the diseases of his ancestors, and endures them, for the most part very stoically, in one of those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.

Virginia Woolf
Literature is no one's private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.

Virginia Woolf
For pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space ; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects ; and sounds very remote and then very close ; flesh being gashed and blood sparting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude. — Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Virginia Woolf