English author Adeline Virginia Woolf wrote modernist classics including ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ and ‘To the Lighthouse,’ as well as pioneering feminist texts, ‘A Room of One’s Own’ and ‘Three Guineas.’
She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and also a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a literary technique. Famous Virginia Woolf quotes will inspire you to discover your true-self and to open yourself to infinite possibility for the joy, peace and success you can experience.
If you’re searching for best sayings from authors that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of timeless Jane Austen quotes, F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes, and top Maya Angelou quotes.
Famous Virginia Woolf Quotes
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind. Virginia Woolf
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. Virginia Woolf
Books are the mirrors of the soul. Virginia Woolf
Books are the mirrors of the soul. Virginia Woolf
Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money. Virginia Woolf
Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women? Virginia Woolf
Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Virginia Woolf
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. Virginia Woolf
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Virginia Woolf
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. 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
I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. Virginia Woolf
As 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
Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money. Virginia Woolf
For it would seem her case proved it that we write, not with the fingers but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fiber of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver. Virginia Woolf
As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world. Virginia Woolf
And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking. Virginia Woolf
When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they? Virginia Woolf
For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately. Virginia Woolf
As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking. Virginia Woolf
I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual. Virginia Woolf
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. Virginia Woolf
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others. Virginia Woolf
No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. Virginia Woolf
When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness I am nothing. Virginia Woolf
Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others. Virginia Woolf
Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Virginia Woolf
There was a star riding through clouds one night, I said to the star, Consume me. Virginia Woolf
Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? Virginia Woolf
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Virginia Woolf
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. Virginia Woolf
Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy. Virginia Woolf
Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women? Virginia Woolf
Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. Virginia Woolf
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. Virginia Woolf
Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Virginia Woolf
Love, the poet said, is woman’s whole existence. Virginia Woolf
How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself. Virginia Woolf
I have lost friends, some by death others by sheer inability to cross the street. Virginia Woolf
What is the meaning of life? That was all a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. Virginia Woolf
To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Virginia Woolf
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Virginia Woolf
What does the brain matter compared with the heart? 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, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen. Virginia Woolf
I worship you but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer? Virginia Woolf
All extremes of feeling are allied with madness. Virginia Woolf
I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything. Virginia Woolf
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in. Virginia Woolf
They went in and out of each other’s minds without any effort. 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
You cannot find peace by avoiding life. 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
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. Virginia Woolf
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity. Virginia Woolf
Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women? Virginia Woolf
For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. Virginia Woolf
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. Virginia Woolf
Melancholy were the sounds on a winter’s night. Virginia Woolf
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. 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
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Virginia Woolf
Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body. Virginia Woolf
I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. Virginia Woolf
She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day. Virginia Woolf
Arrange whatever pieces come your way. Virginia Woolf
I have lost friends, some by death others by sheer inability to cross the street. Virginia Woolf
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. Virginia Woolf
I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me. Virginia Woolf
My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for? Virginia Woolf
He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink. Virginia Woolf
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. Virginia Woolf
To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Virginia Woolf
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in. Virginia Woolf
For it would seem her case proved it that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver. Virginia Woolf
Language is wine upon the lips. Virginia Woolf
I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life. Virginia Woolf
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. Virginia Woolf
I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual. Virginia Woolf
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly. Virginia Woolf
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves. Virginia Woolf
Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent. Virginia Woolf
When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness I am nothing. Virginia Woolf
Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible. Virginia Woolf
I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Virginia Woolf
The older one grows, the more one likes indecency. Virginia Woolf
He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams. Virginia Woolf
It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. Virginia Woolf
Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation. 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 worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer? Virginia Woolf
There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking. Virginia Woolf
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
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points. Virginia Woolf
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title. Virginia Woolf
It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses. Virginia Woolf
To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have to want and want how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again! Virginia Woolf
Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life. Virginia Woolf
I want to write a novel about Silence, he said; the things people don’t say. Virginia Woolf
If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers? Virginia Woolf
Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I’m never not thinking of you. Virginia Woolf
To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father. Virginia Woolf
The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. Virginia Woolf
The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own. Virginia Woolf
I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore. Virginia Woolf
One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats and one always secretes too much jelly. Virginia Woolf
By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream. Virginia Woolf
This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room. Virginia Woolf
How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger? Virginia Woolf
Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body? Virginia Woolf
I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful. Virginia Woolf
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity. Virginia Woolf
I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow. Virginia Woolf
