Virginia Woolf Quotes

612 Sourced Quotes

Nothing is stronger than the position of the dead among the living.

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

Virginia Woolf
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
I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.

Virginia Woolf
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

Virginia Woolf
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
Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.

Virginia Woolf
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
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
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
Never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having.

Virginia Woolf
Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read.

Virginia Woolf
When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.

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

Virginia Woolf
Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?

Virginia Woolf
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
The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.

Virginia Woolf
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
My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.

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

Virginia Woolf