Virginia Woolf Quotes

612 Sourced Quotes

And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is a woman's whole existence...

Virginia Woolf
English which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.... The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare, Donne, Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.

Virginia Woolf
Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees... one's happiness, one's reality?

Virginia Woolf
She tapped on the window with her embossed hairbrush. They were too far off to hear. The drone of the trees was in their ears; the chirp of birds; other incidents of garden life, inaudible, invisible to her in the bedroom, absorbed them. Isolated on a green island, hedged about with snowdrops, laid with a counterpane of puckered silk, the innocent island floated under her window. Only George lagged behind.

Virginia Woolf
He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds-that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things.

Virginia Woolf
For it is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they can only say 'good to eat' when they mean 'beautiful' and the other way about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves.

Virginia Woolf
To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?

Virginia Woolf
The immense success of our life is, I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it.

Virginia Woolf
So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then.

Virginia Woolf
When we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's arm-chair.[we] confuse his "Rinse the mouth — rinse the mouth" with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us.

Virginia Woolf
Books should stand on their own feet... If they need shoring up by a preface here, an introduction there, they have no more right to exist than a table that needs a wad of paper under one leg in order to stand steady.

Virginia Woolf
To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm's way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin.

Virginia Woolf