Virginia Woolf Quotes

612 Sourced Quotes

She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.

Virginia Woolf
He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above his paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged with existence.

Virginia Woolf
And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.

Virginia Woolf
Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it...

Virginia Woolf
He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.

Virginia Woolf
She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell and she had felt that was true of life — one scratched on the wall.

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

Virginia Woolf
Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.

Virginia Woolf
For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.

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
Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins—of happiness and unhappiness.

Virginia Woolf
To know whom to write for is to know how to write.

Virginia Woolf
Content is disillusioning to behold: what is there to be content about?

Virginia Woolf
What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once.

Virginia Woolf
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Virginia Woolf
This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

Virginia Woolf
I got out this diary and read, as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity.

Virginia Woolf
I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh.

Virginia Woolf
Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall

Virginia Woolf
O how blessed it would be never to marry, or grow old; but to spend one's life innocently and indifferently among the trees and rivers which alone can keep one cool and childlike in the midst of the troubles of the world!

Virginia Woolf
But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.

Virginia Woolf
Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.

Virginia Woolf
Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

Virginia Woolf
There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.

Virginia Woolf