Top 100 Virginia Woolf Quotes
#1. 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.
Virginia Woolf
#2. It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.
Virginia Woolf
#3. It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for.
Virginia Woolf
#4. 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.
Virginia Woolf
#6. I am clouded and bruised with the print of minds and faces and things so subtle that they have smell, colour, texture, substance, but no name.
Virginia Woolf
#7. But the Daily Mail isn't to be trusted," Jacob said to himself, looking about for something else to read.
Virginia Woolf
#9. There was all the difference in the world between this planning airily away from the canvas and actually taking her brush and making the first mark.
Virginia Woolf
#10. As perhaps at midnight, when all boundaries are lost,
Virginia Woolf
#11. The ghost of a roar of laughter came out to them, and was drowned at once in the wind.
Virginia Woolf
#12. Her eyes were full of a hot liquid (she did not think of tears at first) which, without disturbing the firmness of her lips, made the air thick, rolled down her cheeks. She had perfect control of herself-Oh, yes!-in every other way.
Virginia Woolf
#13. He was afraid he did not understand beauty apart form human beings.
Virginia Woolf
#14. Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.
Virginia Woolf
#15. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.
Virginia Woolf
#16. O why do I ever let anyone read what I write! Every time I have to go through a breakfast with a letter of criticism I swear I will write for my own praise or blame in future. It is a misery.
Virginia Woolf
#17. How lovely goodness is in those who, stepping lightly, go smiling through the world.
Virginia Woolf
#18. If newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art.
Virginia Woolf
#19. For it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge
Virginia Woolf
#20. The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
Virginia Woolf
#21. Neither of us knows what the public will think. There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at forty) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.
Virginia Woolf
#23. I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in themselves.
Virginia Woolf
#24. I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.
Virginia Woolf
#25. 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.
Virginia Woolf
#27. But the noise!" she said. "The noise!" "The sign of a successful party.
Virginia Woolf
#28. For such gestures one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime
Virginia Woolf
#29. She didn't know their names, but friends she knew they were, friends without names, songs without words, always the best.
Virginia Woolf
#30. I' is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being.
Virginia Woolf
#31. We have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal in the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print.
Virginia Woolf
#32. You have been marking the passages that seem to approve of your own character.
Virginia Woolf
#33. The mind is the most capricious of insects - flitting, fluttering.
Virginia Woolf
#34. Yet he too obsessed me for years. Until I wrote it out, I would find my lips moving; I would be arguing with him; raging against him; saying to myself all that I never said to him. How deep they drove themselves into me, the things it was impossible to say aloud.
Virginia Woolf
#35. Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.
Virginia Woolf
#36. It was protective, on her side; sprang from a sense of being in league together, a presentiment of something that was bound to part them (they spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe), which led to this chivalry, this protective feeling which was much more on her side than Sally's.
Virginia Woolf
#37. 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.
Virginia Woolf
#39. It was one of those unclassified affections of which there are so many.
Virginia Woolf
#40. I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; "the things people don't say.
Virginia Woolf
#41. To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand, is not easy.
Virginia Woolf
#43. The public and the private worlds are inseparably connected ... the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.
Virginia Woolf
#44. And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.
Virginia Woolf
#45. For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet.
Virginia Woolf
#46. Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified.
Virginia Woolf
#47. We scarcely want to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.
Virginia Woolf
#49. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension.
Virginia Woolf
#50. I would go with you through the fires of death. Yet am happiest alone.
Virginia Woolf
#51. History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.
Virginia Woolf
#52. When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch unregarded I need no words.
Virginia Woolf
#53. Facts are all that they can offer us, and facts are a very inferior form of fiction.
Virginia Woolf
#54. I fear I shall be a clinger to the outsides of words all my life.
Virginia Woolf
#55. Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.
Virginia Woolf
#56. 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?
Virginia Woolf
#57. 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
#58. I'll be blasted', he said, 'if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I'll write, from this day forward, to please myself
Virginia Woolf
#59. Tears slid; tears fell; tears, like diamonds, collecting powder in the ruts of her cherry blossom cheeks.
Virginia Woolf
#60. Unless I can stretch and touch something hard, I shall be blown down the eternal corridors for ever. What then can I touch? What brick, what stone? and so draw myself across the enormous gulf into my body safely?
Virginia Woolf
#61. Think of me, the uneducated child reading books in my room at 22 Hyde Park Gate
now advanced to this glory ... Yes; all that reading, I say, has borne this odd fruit. And I am pleased.
Virginia Woolf
#62. The fibres of our secular hearts are bent and bowed beneath the unaccustomed tempest.
Virginia Woolf
#63. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?
Virginia Woolf
#64. The spirit of peace descended like a cloud from heaven, for if the spirit of peace dwells anywhere, it is in the courts and quadrangles of Oxbridge on a fine October morning.
Virginia Woolf
#65. They had reached, she felt, a sunny island where peace dwelt, sanity reigned and the sun forever shone, the blessed island of good boots.
Virginia Woolf
#67. How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it is liking one felt, or disliking?
Virginia Woolf
#68. The sweetness of this content overflowing runs down the walls of my mind, and liberates understanding.
Virginia Woolf
#70. The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.' That will be useful.
Virginia Woolf
#71. A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing.
Virginia Woolf
#72. Fending for oneself alone on a desert island is really no laughing matter. It is no crying one either
Virginia Woolf
#73. To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss between oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently.
Virginia Woolf
#74. Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!
Virginia Woolf
#75. I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.
Virginia Woolf
#76. The whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string
Virginia Woolf
#77. Her eyes seemed to question, to commiserate, to be, for a second, love itself.
Virginia Woolf
#78. 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.
Virginia Woolf
#79. For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him.
Virginia Woolf
#80. Anyhow, she thought, they are aware of each other; they live in each other; what else is love, she asked, listening to their laughter.
Virginia Woolf
#81. Like all feelings felt for oneself, Mrs. Ramsay thought, it made one sad. It was so inadequate, what one could give in return; and what Rose felt was quite out of proportion to anything she actually was.
Virginia Woolf
#82. Sometimes it seems to me that I shall never write out all the books I have in my head, because of the strain. The devilish thing about writing is that it calls upon every nerve to hold itself taut. This is exactly what I cannot do
Virginia Woolf
#83. In the flailing light they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances
Virginia Woolf
#84. The liftman in the tube is an eternal necessity ...
Virginia Woolf
#85. I do think all good and evil comes from words. I have to tune myself into a good temper with something musical, and I run to a book as a child to its mother.
Virginia Woolf
#86. When I heard you cry I followed you, and saw you put down your handkerchief, screwed up, with its rage, with its hate, knotted in it.
Virginia Woolf
#87. Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.
Virginia Woolf
#88. Leonard Woolf: If I didn't know you better I'd call this ingratitude.
Virginia Woolf: I am ungrateful? You call ME ungrateful? My life has been stolen from me. I'm living in a town I have no wish to live in... I'm living a life I have no wish to live... How did this happen?
Virginia Woolf
#89. The words issuing from her lips like crumbs of dry biscuit.
Virginia Woolf
#90. Like all very handsome men who die tragically, he left not so much a character behind him as a legend. Youth and death shed a halo through which it is difficult to see a real face ...
Virginia Woolf
#91. One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see.
Virginia Woolf
#92. Her pleasant brown eyes resembled Ralph's, save in expression, for whereas he seemed to look straightly and keenly at one object, she appeared to be in the habit of considering everything from many different points of view.
Virginia Woolf
#93. Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins
of happiness and unhappiness.
Virginia Woolf
#95. You're going to go on dreaming and imagining and making up stories about me as you walk along the street, and pretending that we're riding in a forest, or landing on an island - '
'No. I shall think of you ordering dinner, paying bills, doing the accounts, showing old ladies the relics -
Virginia Woolf
#96. (Jane Austen) is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.
Virginia Woolf
#97. I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.
Virginia Woolf
#98. For nothing matters except life; and, of course, order.
Virginia Woolf
#99. I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony.
Virginia Woolf
#100. Even Orlando (who had no conceit of her person) knew it, for she smiled the involuntary smile which women smile when their own beauty, which seems not their own, forms like a drop falling or a fountain rising and confronts them all of a sudden in the glass.
Virginia Woolf
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