Virginia Woolf: Quotes about life

Virginia Woolf was English writer. Explore interesting quotes on life.

Virginia Woolf: 764 quotes536 likes

“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

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

“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

“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

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

“Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.”

“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

“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.

“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

“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

“Oh, I am in love with life!”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell and she had felt that was true of life — one scratched on the wall.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

“Chastity… has, even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

“what she loved: life, London, this moment of June.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

“There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death…”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. 'About life, about death; about Mrs Ramsay”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody.
Part III, Ch. 5
To the Lighthouse (1927)

“We may enjoy our room in the tower, with the painted walls and the commodious bookcases, but down in the garden there is a man digging who buried his father this morning, and it is he and his like who live the real life and speak the real language.”

Virginia Woolf The Common Reader

"Montaigne" http://teaching.quotidiana.org/essays/Woolf_Montaigne.html <br class="br">The Common Reader (1925)

“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)

“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?”

2 January 1923
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

“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?”

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