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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   quotes 530   likes

Virginia Woolf Quotes

“At this Helen laughed outright. "Nonsense," she said. "You're not a Christian. You've never thought what you are.—And there are lots of other questions," she continued, "though perhaps we can't ask them yet." Although they had talked so freely they were all uncomfortably conscious that they really knew nothing about each other.
"The important questions," Hewet pondered, "the really interesting ones. I doubt that one ever does ask them."
Rachel, who was slow to accept the fact that only a very few things can be said even by people who know each other well, insisted on knowing what he meant.
"Whether we've ever been in love?" she enquired. "Is that the kind of question you mean?"”

Virginia Woolf book The Voyage Out

The Voyage Out (1915), Ch. XI

Love , People , Question

“In brain and insight she is not as highly organised as I am. But then she is aware of this, and so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I have always most wished from everyone.”

Virginia Woolf

Monday 21 December 1925
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

Maternity

“You are not listening to me. You are making phrases about Byron. And while you gesticulate, with your cloak, your cane, I am trying to expose a secret told to nobody yet; I am asking you (as I stand with my back to you) to take my life in your hands and tell me whether I am doomed always to cause repulsion in those I love?”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Bernard, section III
The Waves (1931)

Love , Life , Secret

“Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves.”

Virginia Woolf

Monday 20 April 1925
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

Happiness

“Here I come to one of the memoir writer’s difficulties — one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: ‘This is what happened’; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. Who was I then? Adeline Virginia Stephen, the second daughter of Leslie and Julia Prinsep Stephen, born on 25th January 1882, descended from a great many people, some famous, others obscure; born into a large connection, born not of rich parents, but of well-to-do parents, born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world.”

Virginia Woolf

"A Sketch of the Past" (written 1939, published posthumously)

People , World , Communication , Failure

“Margaret Ll. Davies writes that Janet is dying and will I write on her for The Times – a curious thought, rather: as if it mattered who wrote, or not. But this flooded me with the idea of Janet yesterday. I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person.”

Virginia Woolf

Entry of 11 July 1937, in A Writer's Diary (1953)

Idea , Thinking , Time , Personality

“A desire for children, I suppose; for Nessa's life; for the sense of flowers breaking all round me involuntarily. […] Years and years ago, after the Lytton affair, I said to myself, walking up the hill at Bayreuth, never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having; good advice I think. And then I went on to say to myself that one must like things for themselves; or rather, rid them of their bearing upon one's personal life. One must venture on to the things that exist independently of oneself. Now this is very hard for young women to do. Yet I got satisfaction from it. And now, married to L., I never have to make the effort. Perhaps I have been to happy for my soul's good? And does some of my discontent come from feeling that?”

Virginia Woolf

2 January 1923
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

Life , Women , Children , Feeling

“Morgan has the artist's mind; he says the simple things that clever people don't say; I find him the best of critics for that reason. Suddenly out comes the obvious thing that one has overlooked.”

Virginia Woolf

6 November 1919
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

People

“The chief charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold any property; (2) that she was a woman which amounts to much the same thing …”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando: A Biography (1928), Ch. 4

Dead

“Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando: A Biography (1928), Ch. 2

Time , Animals

“Lord, how I praise God that I had a bent strong enough to coerce every minute of my life since I was born! This fiddling and drifting and not impressing oneself upon anything – this always refraining and fingering and cutting things up into little jokes and facetiousness – that's what's so annihilating. Yet given little money, little looks, no special gift – what can one do? How could one battle? How could one leap on the back of life and wring its scruff?”

Virginia Woolf

Thursday 20 February, 1930
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

Life , Money , God , Strong

“Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody.”

Virginia Woolf A Letter to a Young Poet

"A Letter to a Young Poet"
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)

Animals

“A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway (1925)

Pleasure

“She alone spoke the truth; to her alone could he speak it. That was the source of her everlasting attraction for him, perhaps; she was a person to whom one could say what came into one's head.”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Part III, Ch. 9
To the Lighthouse (1927)

Truth , Personality

“Theirs, too, is the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.”

Virginia Woolf The Common Reader

"Notes on an Elizabethan Play"
The Common Reader (1925)

Sea

“I am amused at my relations with her: left so ardent in January – and now what? Also I like her presence and her beauty. Am I in love with her? But what is love? Her being 'in love' with me, excites and flatters; and interests. What is this 'love?”

Virginia Woolf

Thursday 20 May 1926
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

Love , Beauty

“For I am more selves than Neville thinks. We are not simple as our friends would have us to meet their needs. Yet love is simple.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Bernard, section III
The Waves (1931)

Love , Thinking

“Words rose above the intolerably laden dumb oxen plodding through the mud. Words without meaning - wonderful words.”

Virginia Woolf book Between the Acts

Between the Acts (1941)

“I have seen very few people. Nessa came again. How painful these meetings are! Let me try to analyse. Perhaps it is that we both feel that we can exist independently of the other. The door shuts between us, and life flows on again and completely removes the trace. That is an absurd exaggeration.”

Virginia Woolf

4 February 1922
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

Life , Pain , People , Feeling

“Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando: A Biography (1928), Ch. 4

“That great Cathedral space which was childhood.”

Virginia Woolf book Moments of Being

"A Sketch of the Past"
Moments of Being (1939-1940)

Childhood

“That was the burden,' she mused, 'laid on me in the cradle; murmured by waves; breathed by restless elm trees; crooned by singing women; what we must rememeber; what we would forget.”

Virginia Woolf book Between the Acts

Between the Acts (1941)

Women , Tree , Singing , Forgetting

“If, then, one should try to sum up the character of women's fiction at the present moment, one would say that it is courageous; it is sincere; it keeps closely to what women feel. It is not bitter. It does not insist upon its femininity.”

Virginia Woolf

"Women and Fiction"
Granite and Rainbow (1958)

Women , Feeling , Courage , Sincerity

“Very much screwed in the head by trying to get Roger's marriage chapter into shape; and also warmed by L. saying last night that he was fonder of me than I of him. A discussion as to which would mind the other's death most. He said he depended more upon our common life than I did. He gave the garden as an instance. He said I live more in a world of my own. I go for long walks alone. So we argued. I was very happy to think I was so much needed. Its strange how seldom one feels this: yet 'life in common' is an immense reality.”

Virginia Woolf

Friday 28 April, 1939
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

Life , Death , Marriage , World

“Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.”

Virginia Woolf The Common Reader

On Not Knowing Greek http://books.google.com/books?id=lQLAv2zRY7MC&q="Humour+is+the+first+of+the+gifts+to+perish+in+a+foreign+tongue"&pg=PA36#v=onepage
The Common Reader (1925)

“For ourselves, who are ordinary men and women, let us return thanks to Nature for her bounty by using every one of the senses she has given us; vary our state as much as possible; turn now this side, now that, to the warmth, and relish to the full before the sun goes down the kisses of youth and the echoes of a beautiful voice singing Catullus. Every season is likeable, and wet days and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life, can be full of dreams; and the most common actions—a walk, a talk, solitude in one’s own orchard—can be enhanced and lit up by the association of the mind. Beauty is everywhere, and beauty is only two finger’s-breadth from goodness.”

Virginia Woolf The Common Reader

"Montaigne" http://teaching.quotidiana.org/essays/Woolf_Montaigne.html
The Common Reader (1925)

Life , Women , Men , Youth

“But delightful though it is to indulge in righteous indignation, it is misplaced if we agree with the lady's-maid that high birth is a form of congenital insanity, that the sufferer merely inherits the diseases of his ancestors, and endures them, for the most part very stoically, in one of those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.”

Virginia Woolf The Common Reader

"Outlines: Lady Dorothy Nevill"
The Common Reader (1925)

Disease , Home , Birth , Suffering

“As for the soul: why did I say I would leave it out? I forget. And the truth is, one can't write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes; but look at the ceiling, at Grizzle, at the cheaper beasts in the Zoo which are exposed to walkers in Regent's Pak, and the soul slips in. Mrs Webb's book has made me think a little what I could say of my own life. But then there were causes in her life: prayer; principle. None in mine. Great excitability and search after something. Great content – almost always enjoying what I'm at, but with constant change of mood. I don't think I'm ever bored. 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'? What is it? And shall I die before I can find it? Then (as I was walking through Russell Square last night) I see mountains in the sky: the great clouds, and the moon which is risen over Persia; I have a great and astonishing sense of something there, which is 'it' – A sense of my own strangeness, walking on the earth is there too. Who am I, what am I, and so on; these questions are always floating about in me. Is that what I meant to say? Not in the least. I was thinking about my own character; not about the universe. Oh and about society again; dining with Lord Berners at Clive's made me think that. How, at a certain moment, I see through what I'm saying; detest myself; and wish for the other side of the moon; reading alone, that is.”

Virginia Woolf

Saturday 27 February 1926
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

Life , Truth , Books , Soul

“Even Morgan seems to me to be based on some hidden rock. Talking of Proust and Lawrence he said he'd prefer to be Lawrence; but much rather would be himself. He is aloof, serene, a snob, he says, reading masterpieces only.”

Virginia Woolf

Tuesday 18 September 1923
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

Reading

“They never pulled the curtains till it was too dark to see, nor shut the windows till it was too cold. Why shut out the day before it was over? The flowers were still bright; the birds chirped. You could see more in the evening often when nothing interrupted, when there was no fish to order, no telephone to answer.”

Virginia Woolf book Between the Acts

Between the Acts (1941)

Flowers , Bird , Fish

“The artist after all is a solitary being.”

Virginia Woolf

"The Historian and 'The Gibbon'"
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)

“For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 3, p. 51

People , Health , Girl

“Society is the most powerful conception in the world and society has no existence whatsoever.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando: A Biography (1928), Ch. 4

World

“What a born melancholiac I am! The only way I keep afloat is by working. Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down. And as usual, I feel that if I sink further I shall reach the truth. That is the only mitigation; a kind of nobility. Solemnity. Work, reading, writing, are all disguising; and relations with other people. Yes, even having children wold be useless.”

Virginia Woolf

Sunday 23 June, 1929
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

Children , People , Truth , Way

“We have been to Rodmell, and as usual I come home depressed – for no reason. Merely moods. Have other people as many as I have? That I shall never now. And sometimes I suppose that even if I came to the end of my incessant search into what people are and feel I should know nothing still.”

Virginia Woolf

23 May 1921
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

People , Feeling , Home , Search

“He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it — was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando: A Biography (1928), Ch. 1, first lines

Sex , Fashion , Time

“I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.”

Virginia Woolf

"Professions for Women"
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)

Art

“"What is this romance?" she mused.
"Ah, that’s the question. I’ve never come across a definition that satisfied me, though there are some very good ones"—he glanced in the direction of his books.
"It’s not altogether knowing the other person, perhaps—it’s ignorance," she hazarded.
"Some authorities say it’s a question of distance—romance in literature, that is—"
"Possibly, in the case of art. But in the case of people it may be—" she hesitated.”

Virginia Woolf book Night and Day

Night and Day (1919)

People , Books , Art , Literature

“I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee's life of the poet. She died young — alas, she never wrote a word… Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to-night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 6, p. 117)

Life , Women , Children , Sister

“Mrs Ramsay sat silent. She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence, uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships. Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren't things spoilt then, Mrs Ramsay may have asked (it seemed to have happened so often, this silence by her side) by saying them?”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Part III, Ch. 5
To the Lighthouse (1927)

Feeling , Knowledge , Silence

“No one can escape the power of language, let alone those of English birth brought up from childhood, as Mrs. Hilbery had been, to disport themselves now in the Saxon plainness, now in the Latin splendor of the tongue, and stored with memories, as she was, of old poets exuberating in an infinity of vocables. Even Katharine was slightly affected against her better judgment by her mother's enthusiasm. Not that her judgment could altogether acquiesce in the necessity for a study of Shakespeare's sonnets as a preliminary to the fifth chapter of her grandfather's biography. Beginning with a perfectly frivolous jest, Mrs. Hilbery had evolved a theory that Anne Hathaway had a way, among other things, of writing Shakespeare's sonnets; the idea, struck out to enliven a party of professors, who forwarded a number of privately printed manuals within the next few days for her instruction, had submerged her in a flood of Elizabethan literature; she had come half to believe in her joke, which was, she said, at least as good as other people's facts, and all her fancy for the time being centered upon Stratford-on-Avon.”

Virginia Woolf book Night and Day

Source: Night and Day (1919), Ch. 24

People , Way , Literature , Idea

“Dearest,
I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done. Please believe that.
But I know that I shall never get over this: and I am wasting your life. It is this madness. Nothing anyone says can persuade me. You can work, and you will be much better without me. You see I can't write this even, which shows I am right. All I want to say is that until this disease came on we were perfectly happy. It was all due to you. No one could have been so good as you have been, from the very first day till now. Everyone knows that.
V.”

Virginia Woolf

Letter to Leonard Woolf (28 March 1941), from The Virginia Woolf Reader (1984) edited by Mitchell A. Leaska, p. 369, ISBN 0156935902

Life , Disease , Madness , Happiness

“I must try to set aside half an hour in some part of my day, and consecrate it to diary writing. Give it a name and a place, and then perhaps, such is the human mind, I shall come to think it a duty, and disregard other duties for it.”

Virginia Woolf

Wednesday 8 April 1925
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

Thinking , Parting

“I will use these last pages to sum up our circumstances. A map of the world. […]
I seldom see Lytton; that is true. The reason is that we don't fit in, I imagine, to his parties nor he to ours; but that if we can meet in solitude, all goes as usual. Yet what do one's friends mean to one, if one only sees them eight times a year? […]
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

Tuesday 2 September, 1930
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

World , Imagination , Solitude , Light

“Mrs Swithin took her knitting from the table. 'Did you feel,' she asked, 'what he said: we act different parts but are the same?'
'Yes,' Isa answered. 'No,' she added. It was Yes, No. Yes, yes, yes, the tide rushed out embracing. No, no, no, it contracted.”

Virginia Woolf book Between the Acts

Between the Acts (1941)

Feeling , Parting

“Happily, at forty-six I still feel as experimental and on the verge of getting at the truth as ever.”

Virginia Woolf

Saturday 21 April, 1929
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

Truth , Feeling

“She had done the usual trick – been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst (if it had not been for Mr Bankes) were between men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere.”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Part I, Ch. 17
To the Lighthouse (1927)

Women , Men

“A light here required a shadow there.”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Part I, Ch. 9
To the Lighthouse (1927)

Light

“Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.”

Virginia Woolf A Letter to a Young Poet

"A Letter to a Young Poet"
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)

Thinking