Virginia Woolf: Trending quotes

“The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.”

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”

“I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow.”

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

“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.”

“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…”

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

“Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”

“At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever”

“I am rooted, but I flow.”

“Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.”

“Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass. 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.”

“Her heart was made of liquid sunsets.”

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

“On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.”

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

“Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.”

“Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder.
I sob, I sob.”

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