Top 100 Woolf's Quotes
#1. Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.
Edith Sitwell
#2. Frank Morley, who had worked in London at Faber and Faber, was the new head of Harcourt Brace, and he hired me to start in 1940. The early years at Harcourt were wonderful. Almost my first assignment was Virginia Woolf's novel 'Between the Acts.'
Robert Giroux
#4. I love reading other people's diaries, especially someone like Virginia Woolf's - such a formidable woman that it's a revelation when she shows you a more vulnerable side of herself.
Michael Palin
#5. All Woolf's work as I know it constitutes a sort of Ovidian metamorphosis where the freedom sought is the freedom to continue becoming, exploring, wandering, going beyond. She is an escape artist. In
Rebecca Solnit
#6. Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.
Michael Cunningham
#7. She pulled off Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and settled down in a comfortable leather chair by the fire to read.
Lucinda Riley
#8. Mrs Woolf's complaint should be addressed to her creator, who made her, rather than me.
Cecil Beaton
#9. In 1925 Woolf began an affair with Sackville-West, who was married to Harold Nicolson, the diplomat and writer, and the development of their close relationship, which does not seem to have undermined either woman's marriage, coincided with Woolf 's most productive years as a writer.
Jane Goldman
#10. So, when there is a strife of tongues, at some meeting, the chairman, to obtain unity, suggests that every one shall speak in French. Perhaps it is bad French; French may not contain the words that express the speaker's thoughts; nevertheless speaking French imposes some order, some uniformity.
Virginia Woolf
#11. Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.
Virginia Woolf
#12. It's the writing, not the being read, that excites me. Joy is in the doing.
Virginia Woolf
#13. When two people have been married for years they seem to become unconscious of each other's bodily presence so that they move as if alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be answered, and in general seem to experience all the comfort of solitude without its loneliness.
Virginia Woolf
#14. It's funny, isn't it," Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula's ear, "how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too.
Kate Atkinson
#15. Why creeds and prayers and mackintoshes? when, thought Clarissa, that's the miracle, that's the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom she could see going from chest of drawers to dressing-table.
Virginia Woolf
#16. And if literature is not the Bride and Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? 'Confound it all.' he cried, 'why say Bedfellow when one's already said Bride? Why not simply say what one means and save it?
Virginia Woolf
#17. 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' is, to my mind, a work of perfect genius.
Amity Gaige
#18. Under the decent veil of print one can indulge one's egoism to the full.
Virginia Woolf
#19. There never will be a book, because some one else has written it for him," said Mr. Pepper with considerable acidity. "That's what comes of putting things off, and collecting fossils, and sticking Norman arches on one's pigsties.
Virginia Woolf
#20. To be engaged to marry some one with whom you are not in love is an inevitable step in a world where the existence of passion is only a traveler's story brought from the heart of deep forests and told so rarely that wise people doubt whether the story can be true.
Virginia Woolf
#21. And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, "Poor old Augustus--he's a true poet," which was high praise from her husband.
Virginia Woolf
#22. An otherwise happily married couple may turn a mixed doubles game into a scene from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
Rod Laver
#23. This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears.
Virginia Woolf
#24. As for 'drawing you out,' please believe I don't do such things deliberately, with an object
It's only that I am, as a rule, far more interested in people than they are in me
But it makes me a nuisance, I know: only an innocent nuisance.
Virginia Woolf
#25. No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion.
Virginia Woolf
#26. I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.
Virginia Woolf
#27. They say that one must beat one's wings against the storm in the belief that beyond this welter the sun shines
Virginia Woolf
#28. Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?
Virginia Woolf
#29. 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
#30. Love ought to stop on both sides, don't you think, simultaneously?' He spoke without any stress on the words, so as not to wake the sleepers. 'But it won't - that's the devil,' he added in the same undertone.
Virginia Woolf
#31. O how blessed it would be never to marry, or grow old; but to spend one's life innocently and indifferently among the trees and rivers which alone can keep one cool and childlike in the midst of the troubles of the world!
Virginia Woolf
#32. The work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
[on James Joyce's Ulysses]
Virginia Woolf
#33. Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.
Virginia Woolf
#34. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend.
How useful an office one's friends perform when they recall us. Yet how
painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one's self adulterated, mixed up,
become part of another.
Virginia Woolf
#35. Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.
Virginia Woolf
#37. Nothing, however, can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker's.
Virginia Woolf
#38. Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
Virginia Woolf
#39. Virginia Woolf had to ask herself How can one weigh and shape dialogue till each sentence tears the shingles in the bottom of the reader's soul?
Virginia Woolf
#40. We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.
Virginia Woolf
#41. Life's what you see in people's eyes; life's what they learn, and, having learnt it, never, though they seek to hide it, cease to be aware of
what? That life's like that, it seems.
Virginia Woolf
#42. Meanwhile, let us abolish the ticking of time's clock with one blow. Come closer.
Virginia Woolf
#43. In school, I was Martha in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' I loved that.
Cara Delevingne
#44. Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees, ... one's happiness, one's reality?
Virginia Woolf
#45. 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
#46. My earliest experience was reading Edward Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' at 8, you know, with a bunch of kids on my steps - on the stoops - and knowing that I wanted to direct them saying the lines. I don't really know how to articulate that 'cause there wasn't someone to show me.
Lee Daniels
#47. I'm convinced people are wrong when they say it's work that wears one; it's responsibility.
Virginia Woolf
#48. O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!
Virginia Woolf
#49. It's books," sighed Helen, lifting an armful of sad volumes from the floor to the shelf. "Greek from morning to night. If ever Miss Rachel marries, Chailey, pray that she may marry a man who doesn't know his ABC.
Virginia Woolf
#50. The fact about contemporaries is that they're doing the same thing on another railway line: one resents their distracting one, flashing past, the wrong way- something like that: from timidity, partly, one keeps one's eyes on one's own road.
Virginia Woolf
#51. But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.
Virginia Woolf
#53. The grinding of the intellect is for most people as painful as a dentist's drill.
Leonard Woolf
#54. I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.
Virginia Woolf
#55. The strange thing on looking back was the purity, the integrity of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one's feeling for a man.
Virginia Woolf
#56. Then there's Queen Victoria, like a large tea cosy, & Wellington, sleek as a mastiff with paw extended ...
Virginia Woolf
#57. 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.
Virginia Woolf
#58. 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
#59. No decent man ought to read Shakespeare's sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes.
Virginia Woolf
#60. The weight, the pace, the stride of a man's mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully. The ape is too distant to be sedulous. Perhaps
Virginia Woolf
#61. We're all in the dark. We try to find out, but can you imagine anything more ludicrous than one person's opinion of another person? One goes along thinking one knows; but one really doesn't know
Virginia Woolf
#62. [Final diary entry:] Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that it's seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.
Virginia Woolf
#63. It was January. Snow was falling; snow had fallen all day. The sky spread like a grey goose's wing from which feathers where falling all over England.
Virginia Woolf
#64. I should never be able to fulfill what is,I understand, the first duty of a lecturer-to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever.
Virginia Woolf
#65. To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people's eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self.
Virginia Woolf
#66. The day Mother Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? killed Father The Outlaw Josey Wales, they were arguing again about the Pre-Reddening game of Major League Baseball.
Nick DiChario
#67. 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
#68. I attain a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the mind's passage through the world, achieve in the end some kind of whole made of shivering fragments.
Virginia Woolf
#69. The sound of the chorus came across the water and I felt leap up that old impulse, which has moved me all my life, to be thrown up and down on the roar of other people's voices, singing the same song; to be tossed up and down on the roar of almost senseless merriment, sentiment, triumph, desire.
Virginia Woolf
#70. Nothing shakes my opinion of a book. Nothing
nothing. Only perhaps if it's the book of a young person
or of a friend
no, even so, I think myself infallible.
Virginia Woolf
#71. Perhaps it was better not to see pictures: they only made one hopelessly discontented with one's own work.
Virginia Woolf
#72. It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh ... Robert Schumann has been mentioned ... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath ... some of them with rather grim ends.
Stephen Fry
#73. You can't drive a bayonet through a chap's body in cold blood," he remembered him saying. "And you can't go in for an exam. without drinking," said Edward.
Virginia Woolf
#74. It's something useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life; red, blue, purple; a spirit; a splash ... free from taint, dependence, soilure of humanity or care for one's kind; something rash, ridiculous ... ecstasy - it's ecstasy that matters.
Virginia Woolf
#75. Romantic Love is only an Illusion. A story one makes up in One's Mind about Another Person.
Virginia Woolf
#76. Illness is a part of every human being's experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.
Virginia Woolf
#77. It's hard sometimes to see through the fog, the pain, hurt, fear and everything else we live with every day. Virginia Woolf couldn't do it. Annette Klinger couldn't, either. My heart breaks for them - that they couldn't get the help they needed for a disease they couldn't control.
Nyrae Dawn
#78. I live; I die; the sea comes over me; it's the blue that lasts.
Virginia Woolf
#79. One must be crucified on one's own private cross.
Leonard Woolf
#80. 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
#81. But cricket was no mere game. Cricket was important. [S]he could never help reading about cricket. [S]he read the scores in the stop press first, then how it was a hot day; then about a murder case.
Virginia Woolf
#82. I note however that this diary writing does not count as writing, since I have just re-read my year's diary and am much struck by the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along, sometimes indeed jerking almost intolerably over the cobbles.
Virginia Woolf
#83. If the best of one's feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?
Virginia Woolf
#84. As nobody can possibly tell me whether one's writing is bad or good, the only certain value is one's own pleasure. I am sure of that.
Virginia Woolf
#85. There is nothing to be said except about the sheer waste and futility of it all. It is the war all over again, when one is rung up to be told that Rupert was dead, or that one's brother was killed, and one knew that it was only to produce the kind of world we are living in now. Horrible.
Leonard Woolf
#86. But suppose Peter said to her, "Yes, yes, but your parties - what's the sense of your parties?" all she could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): They're an offering; which sounded horribly vague. But
Virginia Woolf
#87. Have I never understood you, Katherine? Have I been very selfish?' 'Yes ... You've asked her for sympathy, and she's not sympathetic; you've wanted her to be practical, and she's not practical.
Virginia Woolf
#88. These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.
Virginia Woolf
#89. You're infinitely simpler than I am ... That's the difficulty.
Virginia Woolf
#90. I use my friends rather as giglamps : There's another field I see: by your light. Over there's a hill. I widen my landscape.
Virginia Woolf
#91. My notion's to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves.
Virginia Woolf
#92. For one's children so often gave one's own perceptions a little thrust forwards.
Virginia Woolf
#93. What one wants in the person one lives with is that they should keep one at one's best.
Virginia Woolf
#94. Why, after all, did she do these things? why seek pinnacles and stand drenched in fire? Might it consume her anyhow! Burn her to cinders! Better anything, better brandish one's torch and hurl it to earth than taper and dwindle away ...
Virginia Woolf
#95. But this was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to sit in one's garden and look at the slopes of a hill running purple down into the distant heather.
Virginia Woolf
#96. One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.
Virginia Woolf
#97. The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom.
Virginia Woolf
#98. I have never read Sylvia Plath. My mother has never read Virginia Woolf. In general, we have stayed out of one another's way like this.
Alison Bechdel
#99. There's no doubt in my mind that I've found out how to begin at this age to say sth in my own voice
and that interests me so that I can go ahead without any : ) praise
Virginia Woolf
#100. Mrs. Dalloway raised her hand to her eyes, and, as the maid shut the door to, and she heard the swish of Lucy's skirts, she felt like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response to old devotions.
Virginia Woolf
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