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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

“Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.”

Virginia Woolf

“The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

“I am not one and simple, but complex and many.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“Why must they grow up and lose it all?”

Virginia Woolf

“Well, we must wait for the future to show.”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

“If the best of one's feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?”

Virginia Woolf book Night and Day

Source: Night and Day

“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

Source: On Being Ill

“But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.”

Virginia Woolf

Source: Selected Letters

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

Virginia Woolf

Source: Virginia Woolf

“Her eyes are pure stars, and her fingers, if they touch you, freeze you to the bone.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

“Yes, I deserve a spring–I owe nobody nothing.”

Virginia Woolf

Source: A Writer's Diary

“I am not so gifted as at one time seemed likely.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“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.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

“If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women…”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

“Marvelous are the innocent.”

Virginia Woolf book Jacob's Room

Source: Jacob's Room

“For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.”

Virginia Woolf The Common Reader

Source: The Common Reader

“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.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

“One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Ch. 4
Source: Something, perhaps, we must believe in, and as Orlando, we have said, had no belief in the usual divinities she bestowed her credulity upon great men — yet with a distinction. Admirals, soldiers, statesmen, moved her not at all. But the very thought of a great writer stirred her to such a pitch of belief that she almost believed him to be invisible. Her instinct was a sound one. One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see.

“madam," the man cried, leaping to the ground, "you're hurt!" "I'm dead, sir!" she replied. A few minutes later, they became engaged.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

“Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

“But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“Language is wine upon the lips.”

Virginia Woolf

“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.”

Virginia Woolf book Jacob's Room

Source: Jacob's Room

“Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

“I am drowning, my dear, in seas of fire.”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

“When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“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 book The Voyage Out

Source: The Voyage Out

“She was like a crinkled poppy; with the desire to drink dry dust.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And
I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often
not. Life is a dream surely.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Bernard, section IX
Source: The Waves (1931)
Context: Our friends, how seldom visited, how little known — it is true; and yet, when I meet an unknown person, and try to break off, here at this table, what I call “my life”, it is not one life that I look back upon; I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am — Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs.

“I feel certain that I'm going mad again, I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices”

Virginia Woolf

“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.”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

“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?”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

“One must love everything.”

Virginia Woolf book Jacob's Room

Source: Jacob's Room

“Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then — our friends are not able to finish their stories.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves (1931), Ch. II

“There are moments when one can neither think nor feel, she thought, and if one can neithre feel nor think, where's one?”

Virginia Woolf

“In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.”

Virginia Woolf book Jacob's Room

Source: Jacob's Room

“to teach without zest is a crime.”

Virginia Woolf

“Would there be trees if we didn't see them?”

Virginia Woolf book The Years

Source: The Years

“It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Variant: It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.... Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.
Source: A Room of One's Own

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

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

“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 book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

“Oh, I am in love with life!”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“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 book The Voyage Out

Source: The Voyage Out

“After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway