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Virginia Woolf Quotes
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Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer who is considered one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century, and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Born in an affluent household in Kensington, London, she attended the King's College London and was acquainted with the early reformers of women's higher education.

Having been home-schooled for most part of her childhood, mostly in English classics and Victorian literature, Woolf began writing professionally in 1900. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. She published her first novel titled The Voyage Out in 1915, through the Hogarth Press, a publishing house that she established with her husband, Leonard Woolf. Her best-known works include the novels Mrs Dalloway , To the Lighthouse and Orlando , and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own , with its dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Woolf became one of the central subjects of the 1970s movement of feminist criticism, and her works have since garnered much attention and widespread commentary for "inspiring feminism", an aspect of her writing that was unheralded earlier. Her works are widely read all over the world and have been translated into more than fifty languages. She suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life and took her own life by drowning in 1941 at the age of 59.

✵ 25. January 1882 – 28. March 1941  •  Other names Adeline Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf photo
Virginia Woolf: 382 quotes536 likes

Virginia Woolf Quotes

“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.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“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.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

“We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe
that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie
asleep.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

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

Virginia Woolf book Monday or Tuesday

Source: Monday or Tuesday

“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 book Jacob's Room

Source: Jacob's Room

“A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her.”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

“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 book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

“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?”

Virginia Woolf book Jacob's Room

Source: Jacob's Room

“Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.”

Virginia Woolf

“Still, life had a way of adding day to day”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Variant: Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.
Source: Mrs. Dalloway

“All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

“Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“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.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

“Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 2, p. 26

“some we know to be dead even though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through all the forms of life; other are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

“The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.”

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf book Jacob's Room

Variant: But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.
Source: Jacob's Room

“She read everything.”

Virginia Woolf

“Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

“And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.”

Virginia Woolf

“I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“They can because they think they can.”

Virginia Woolf

Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book V

“Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

“My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.”

Virginia Woolf

Source: Selected Letters

“But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.”

Virginia Woolf book The Years

Source: The Years

“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.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

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

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

“Thoughts are divine.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

“Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.”

Virginia Woolf

“My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.”

Virginia Woolf

5 December 1919
A Moment's Liberty (1990)
Source: A Writer's Diary
Context: This last week L. has been having a little temperature in the evening, due to malaria, and that due to a visit to Oxford; a place of death and decay. I'm almost alarmed to see how entirely my weight rests on his prop. And almost alarmed to see how intensely I'm specialised. My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child – wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.

“Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

“The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme -- thinking too much.”

Virginia Woolf

Source: A Writer's Diary

“The moment was all; the moment was enough.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“… But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful…”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“A million candles burnt in him without his being at the trouble of lighting a single one”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

“At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.”

Virginia Woolf

“But nevertheless, the fact remained, it was almost impossible to dislike anyone if one looked at them.”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

“If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

“Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.”

Virginia Woolf book Night and Day

Source: Night and Day

“Half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew for no one was ever for a second taken in.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

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

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse