Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf Quotes
612 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
Nothing is stronger than the position of the dead among the living.
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
Madam," the man cried, leaping to the ground, "you're hurt!" "I'm dead, sir!" she replied. A few minutes later, they became engaged.
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases.
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
Never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having.
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read.
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
It was the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind indelibly.
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost. Life would split asunder without them. 'Come to tea, come to dinner, what's the truth of the story? have you heard the news? life in the capital is wonderful; the Russian dancers....' These are our stays and props. These lace our days together and make of life a perfect globe.
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly.
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter!
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Submit to me." So she said nothing, but looked doggedly and sadly at the shore, wrapped in its mantle of peace; as if the people there had fallen alseep, she thought; were free like smoke, were free to come and go like ghosts. They have no suffering there, she thought.
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
Virginia Woolf
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
...
25
Quote of the day
No furniture so charming as books, even if you never open them or read a single word.
Sydney Smith
Virginia Woolf
Creative Commons
Born:
January 25, 1882
Died:
March 28, 1941
(aged 59)
Bio:
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century.
Known for:
Mrs Dalloway (1925)
To the Lighthouse (1927)
A Room of One's Own (1929)
The Waves (1931)
Most used words:
life
,
people
,
mind
,
thought
,
time
,
human
,
writing
,
love
,
woman
,
truth
,
women
,
books
,
man
,
read
,
write
Virginia Woolf on Wikipedia
Virginia Woolf works on Gutenberg Project
Virginia Woolf works on Wikisource
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Virginia Woolf Quotes
Virginia Woolf Short Quotes
Quotes about Virginia Woolf
English Novelist Quotes
Novelist Quotes
19th-century Novelist Quotes
19th-century Women
Women Novelists
Related People
James Joyce
Irish Novelist
Sylvia Plath
American Novelist
Family
Leslie Stephen
Father
Leonard Woolf
Spouse
Vanessa Bell
Sister
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes