Virginia Woolf Quotes

612 Sourced Quotes

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.

Virginia Woolf
Once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.

Virginia Woolf
What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.

Virginia Woolf
For it is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they can only say 'good to eat' when they mean 'beautiful' and the other way about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves.

Virginia Woolf
Mrs Swithin took her knitting from the table. 'Did you feel,' she asked, 'what he said: we act different parts but are the same?'

Virginia Woolf
She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was however; there she was.

Virginia Woolf
If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women...

Virginia Woolf
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Virginia Woolf
I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.

Virginia Woolf
The problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron.

Virginia Woolf
Does housekeeping interest you at all? I think it really ought to be just as good as writing and I never see where the separation between the too comes in. At least if you must put books on one side and life on the other, each is a poor and bloodless thing; but my theory is that they mix indistinguishable.

Virginia Woolf
The mind which is most capable of receiving impressions is very often the least capable of drawing conclusions.

Virginia Woolf
You would get longer livelier and more frequent letters from me, if it weren't for the Christian religion. How that bell tolling at the end of the garden, dum dum, dum dum, annoys me! Why is Christianity so insistent and so sad?

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

Virginia Woolf
Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.

Virginia Woolf
Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.

Virginia Woolf
The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.

Virginia Woolf
There was a day when I liked writing letters — it has gone. Unfortunately the passion for getting them remains.

Virginia Woolf
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Virginia Woolf
More and more I come to loathe any dominion of one over another; any leadership, any imposition of the will.

Virginia Woolf
I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.

Virginia Woolf
Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.

Virginia Woolf
When we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's arm-chair.[we] confuse his "Rinse the mouth — rinse the mouth" with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us.

Virginia Woolf
A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her.

Virginia Woolf
If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.

Virginia Woolf