Virginia Woolf Quotes

612 Sourced Quotes

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

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