Virginia Woolf Quotes

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

Virginia Woolf
It's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.

Virginia Woolf
The middlebrow is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige.

Virginia Woolf
She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.

Virginia Woolf
The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering.

Virginia Woolf
I like going from one lighted room to another, such is my brain to me; lighted rooms.

Virginia Woolf
The Reverend C. L. Dodgson had no life. He passed through the world so lightly that he left no print. He melted so passively into Oxford that he is invisible.

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

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

Virginia Woolf
For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.

Virginia Woolf
All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are sides, and it is necessary for one side to beat another side.

Virginia Woolf
As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better.

Virginia Woolf
A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, thought the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.

Virginia Woolf
Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.

Virginia Woolf
I was thrown off ignominiously... I'm so stiff at this moment that if one wrote letters with one's legs, I couldn't write this.

Virginia Woolf
Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

Virginia Woolf
Morgan has the artist's mind; he says the simple things that clever people don't say; I find him the best of critics for that reason. Suddenly out comes the obvious thing that one has overlooked.

Virginia Woolf
In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.

Virginia Woolf
"What is this romance?" she mused.
"Ah, that's the question. I've never come across a definition that satisfied me, though there are some very good ones"—he glanced in the direction of his books.
"It's not altogether knowing the other person, perhaps—it's ignorance," she hazarded.
"Some authorities say it's a question of distance—romance in literature, that is—"
"Possibly, in the case of art. But in the case of people it may be—" she hesitated.

Virginia Woolf
One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy.

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
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
If the best of one's feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?

Virginia Woolf
To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.

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
Why does one write these books after all? The drudgery, the misery, the grind, are forgotten every time; and one launches another, and it seems sheer joy and buoyancy.

Virginia Woolf
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

Virginia Woolf
Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

Virginia Woolf
For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.

Virginia Woolf
The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent, and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip past them in a kind of dream.

Virginia Woolf