Virginia Woolf Quotes

612 Sourced Quotes

Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

Virginia Woolf
While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace.

Virginia Woolf
'The flower,' said Bernard, 'the red carnation that stood in the vase on the table of the restaurant when we dined together with Percival, is become a six-sided flower; made of six lives.'

Virginia Woolf
Half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew for no one was ever for a second taken in.

Virginia Woolf
It is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams

Virginia Woolf
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.

Virginia Woolf
The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

Virginia Woolf
They never pulled the curtains till it was too dark to see, nor shut the windows till it was too cold. Why shut out the day before it was over? The flowers were still bright; the birds chirped. You could see more in the evening often when nothing interrupted, when there was no fish to order, no telephone to answer.

Virginia Woolf
At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.

Virginia Woolf
I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual

Virginia Woolf
That's what makes a view so sad. And so beautiful. It'll be there when we're not.

Virginia Woolf
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.

Virginia Woolf
We are about to part," said Neville. "Here are the boxes; here are the cabs. There is Percival in his billycock hat. He will forget me. He will leave my letters lying about among guns and dogs unaswered. I shall send him poems and he will perhaps reply with a picture post card. But it is for that that I love him. I shall propose a meeting - under a clock, by some Cross; and shall wait and he will not come. It is for that that I love him.

Virginia Woolf
Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

Virginia Woolf
Better was it to ho unknown and leave behind you an arch, a potting shed, a wall where peaches ripen, than to burn like meteor and leave no dust.

Virginia Woolf
Life for both sexes — and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement — is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to one self. By feeling that one has some innate superiority — it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney — for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination — over other people.

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

Virginia Woolf
The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight.

Virginia Woolf
For it has to be remembered that crime and poverty had none of the attractions for the Elizabethans that they have for us. They had none of our modern shame of book leaning, none of our belief that to be born the son of a butcher is a blessing an to be unable to read a virtue; no fancy that what we call 'life' and 'reality' are somehow connected with ignorance and brutality nor, indeed any equivalent for these two words at all. It was not to seek 'life' that Orlando went among them not in quest of 'reality' that he left them.

Virginia Woolf
The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme — thinking too much.

Virginia Woolf
There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over tree-tops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities. What is to come? I know not. But, as I put down my glass I remember; I am engaged to be married. I am to dine with my friends tonight. I am Bernard.

Virginia Woolf
She felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. There were the eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through with it.

Virginia Woolf
For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, "This is what I have made of it! This!" And what had she made of it? What, indeed?

Virginia Woolf
One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.

Virginia Woolf
It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.

Virginia Woolf
Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day

Virginia Woolf
How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers.

Virginia Woolf
We [women] have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that... takes time.

Virginia Woolf
The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.

Virginia Woolf
Nothing, however, can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker's.

Virginia Woolf