Virginia Woolf Quotes

Biography

Type: Novelist, Essayist, Publisher, Critic

Born: 25 January 1882,Kensington, Middlesex, Engla

Died: 28 March 1941 (aged 59),River Ouse, near L

A distinguished English feminist, author, essayist, critic and publisher, Virginia Woolf is regarded to be one of the significant figures of twentieth century modern literature. Woolf is the author of well known books including "Mrs Dalloway"(1925), "To the Lighthouse" (1927) and "Orlando" (1928) but her most famous work is the book-length essay "A Room of One’s Own" (1929).

Virginia Woolf Quotes

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.. Virginia Woolf
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.. Virginia Woolf
Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.. Virginia Woolf
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us.
By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people..
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt
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.

Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your
Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.

A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment,
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.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the
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.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and
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.

Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?. Virginia Woolf
Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.

For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it
For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens 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.

All the time she writing the world had continued.. Virginia Woolf
All the time she writing the world had continued.

As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my
As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely
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.

The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.. Virginia Woolf
The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.

He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write
He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line.

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

Let him be fifty feet away, let him not even speak to you, let him not even see you, he permeated, he prevailed, he imposed himself. He changed everything.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.

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. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.

Beneath my eyes opens - a book; I see to the bottom; the heart - I see to the depths. I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn apart.

Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much as it used to look years ago.

She put on her lace collar. She put on her new hat and he never noticed; and he was happy without her.

He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness - I am nothing.

Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.

My head is a hive of words that won't settle.

What does the brain matter compared with the heart?

To love makes one solitary.

When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?

Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.

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...

It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.

She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees
and changing leaves.

Life stand still here.

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

The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

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

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure

Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?

Like" and "like" and "like"-but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?

No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion.

No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.

in this case, a mother, noted for her beauty, might be reduced to a purple shadow... (Tansley to Lily on her painting of the house & grounds)

Septimus has been working too hard" - that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought.

Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins-of happiness and unhappiness.

About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.

For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.

When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.

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

For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.

Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?

Death is woven in with the violets,” said Louis. “Death and again death.”)

They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought[.]

I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.

Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.

It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.

For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down.

Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

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.

Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read.

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

For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.

anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.

Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned-in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?

What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever.

They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.

What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?

The only advice … that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.

You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a pleasant one.

Human relations, at least between the sexes, were carried on as relations between countries are now - with ambassadors, and treaties. The parties concerned met on the great occasion of the proposal. If this were refused, a state of war was declared.

But china is seldom thrown from a great height; it is one of the rarest of human actions. You have to find in conjunction a very high house, and a woman of such reckless impulse and passionate prejudice that she flings her jar or pot straight from the window without thought of who is below.

(But he could not bring himself to say he loved her; not in so many words.)

Meanwhile, let us abolish the ticking of time’s clock with one blow. Come closer.

They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.

What is nobler," she mused, turning over the photographs, "than to be a woman to whom every one turns, in sorrow or difficulty?

Then may I tell you that the very next words I read were these – ‘Chloe liked Olivia…’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.

When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.

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.

Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.

I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.

I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.

Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.

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.

For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.

When you are silent you are again beautiful.

How could any Lord have made this world?... there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for this world to commit... No happiness lasted.

But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.

For ourselves, who are ordinary men and women, let us return thanks to Nature for her bounty by using every one of the senses she has given us.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; My thoughts follow the exact same process.

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.

How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?

It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.

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.

So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball

With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes - one of the tragedies of married life.

She was married, true; but if one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts.

For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must
be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she
him.

I want someone to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling 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.

We scarcely want to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.

Buy for me from the King's own kennels, the finest elk hounds of the Royal strain, male and female. Bring them back without delay. For," he murmured, scarcely above his breath as he turned to his books, "I have done with men.

I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.

alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know

It is no use trying to sum people up.

You send a girl to school in order to make friends - the right sort.

Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.

...it struck her, this was tragedy- not palls, dust, and the shroud; but children coerced, their spirits subdued.

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.

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...

For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said.

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

And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.

They all dreamt of each other that night, as was natural, considering how thin the partitions were between them, and how strangely they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each other in mid-ocean, and see every detail of each others' faces, and hear whatever they chanced to say.

...to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself.

the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string

Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered

She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose.

I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.

The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight.

If you drink the good wine of the noble countess, you have to entertain her less desirable friends.

Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

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.

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

Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority.

Well, we must wait for the future to show.

For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not – Heaven help us – all having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit?

Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.

The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.’ That will be useful.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order

Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.

I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it - that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?

It's too short,' she said, 'ever so much too short.' Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waters swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.

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