Virginia Woolf Quotes

612 Sourced Quotes

So that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again...

Virginia Woolf
For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.

Virginia Woolf
A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.

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
First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.

Virginia Woolf
I will use these last pages to sum up our circumstances. A map of the world. [...]
I seldom see Lytton; that is true. The reason is that we don't fit in, I imagine, to his parties nor he to ours; but that if we can meet in solitude, all goes as usual. Yet what do one's friends mean to one, if one only sees them eight times a year? [...]
I use my friends rather as giglamps: there's another field I see; by your light. Over there's a hill. I widen my landscape.

Virginia Woolf
The chief charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold any property; (2) that she was a woman which amounts to much the same thing …

Virginia Woolf
This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

Virginia Woolf
The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire.

Virginia Woolf
Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will.

Virginia Woolf
Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.

Virginia Woolf
One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

Virginia Woolf
It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance Whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a glass of wine.

Virginia Woolf
A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.

Virginia Woolf
The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.

Virginia Woolf
Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.

Virginia Woolf
I want some one to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarreling and reconciliation I need privacy—to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits.

Virginia Woolf
Vain trifles as they seem, clothes change our view of the world and the world's view of us.

Virginia Woolf
No one would think of bringing a dog into church. For though a dog is all very well on a gravel path, and shows no disrespect to flowers, the way he wanders down an aisle, looking, lifting a paw, and approaching a pillar with a purpose that makes the blood run cold with horror... a dog destroys the service completely.

Virginia Woolf
Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said, or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them.

Virginia Woolf
The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.

Virginia Woolf
Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.

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

Virginia Woolf
Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.

Virginia Woolf
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

Virginia Woolf