Woolf's Quotes
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Woolf's Quotes & Sayings
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What one wants in the person one lives with is that they should keep one at one's best.
— Virginia Woolf
This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears.
— Virginia Woolf
It's my choice, to choose how to live my life.
— Virginia Woolf
Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?
— Virginia Woolf
The strange thing on looking back was the purity, the integrity of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one's feeling for a man.
— Virginia Woolf
A writer's letters should be as literary as his printed works.
— Virginia Woolf
Perhaps it was better not to see pictures: they only made one hopelessly discontented with one's own work.
— Virginia Woolf
I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.
— Virginia Woolf
One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.
— Virginia Woolf
The work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
[on James Joyce's Ulysses] — Virginia Woolf
[on James Joyce's Ulysses] — Virginia Woolf
Mrs Woolf's complaint should be addressed to her creator, who made her, rather than me.
— Cecil Beaton
Romantic Love is only an Illusion. A story one makes up in One's Mind about Another Person.
— Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf had to ask herself How can one weigh and shape dialogue till each sentence tears the shingles in the bottom of the reader's soul?
— Virginia Woolf
No decent man ought to read Shakespeare's sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes.
— Virginia Woolf
Joy's life in the doing (..) I mean it's the writing, not the being read that excites me.
— Virginia Woolf
Any one who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, with extravagant enthusiasm.
— Virginia Woolf
I have never read Sylvia Plath. My mother has never read Virginia Woolf. In general, we have stayed out of one another's way like this.
— Alison Bechdel
They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort.
— Virginia Woolf
She pulled off Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and settled down in a comfortable leather chair by the fire to read.
— Lucinda Riley
Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.
— Virginia Woolf
I got out this diary and read, as one always reads one's own writing; with a kind of guilty intensity.
— Virginia Woolf
But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.
— Virginia Woolf
Women's rights, that antediluvian topic.
— Virginia Woolf
Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.
— Virginia Woolf
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
— Virginia Woolf
If the best of one's feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?
— Virginia Woolf
Talents of the novelist: ... observation of character, analysis of emotion, people's feelings, personal relations ...
— Virginia Woolf
He's read nothing, thought nothing, felt nothing.
— Virginia Woolf
It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance ...
— Virginia Woolf
Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
— Virginia Woolf
To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people's eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self.
— Virginia Woolf
You're infinitely simpler than I am ... That's the difficulty.
— Virginia Woolf
Habits gradually change the face of one's life as time changes one's physical face; & one does not know it.
— Virginia Woolf
War is not women's history.
— Virginia Woolf
No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion.
— Virginia Woolf
She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.
— Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.
— Edith Sitwell
I'm convinced people are wrong when they say it's work that wears one; it's responsibility.
— Virginia Woolf
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
— Edward Albee
It's been a perpetual discovery, my life. A miracle.
— Virginia Woolf
Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions.
— Edward Albee
Then there's Queen Victoria, like a large tea cosy, & Wellington, sleek as a mastiff with paw extended ...
— Virginia Woolf
Who shall measure the heat and violence of a poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?
— Virginia Woolf
A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.
— Virginia Woolf
Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.
— Virginia Woolf
Nothing has really happened unless it's been described [in words].
— Virginia Woolf
One must be crucified on one's own private cross.
— Leonard Woolf
I find feminism in smiles of a country girl not in Woolf's artworks.
— Ali Rezavand Zayeri
These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.
— Virginia Woolf
I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one's own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.
— Virginia Woolf
They say that one must beat one's wings against the storm in the belief that beyond this welter the sun shines
— Virginia Woolf
Often I feel the different aspects of life bursting my mind asunder.
— Virginia Woolf
Being constantly hungry is no life at all.
— Emma 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
And if someone should see, what matter they?
— Virginia Woolf
Life's bare as a bone.
— Virginia Woolf
To write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.
— Virginia Woolf
For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.
— Virginia Woolf
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
to teach without zest is a crime.
— Virginia Woolf
Mr John Langdon Davies warns women 'that when children cease to be altogether desirable, women cease to be altogether necessary'.
— Virginia Woolf
It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.
— Virginia Woolf
The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.
— Virginia Woolf
They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought[.]
— Virginia Woolf
They neither work nor weep; in their shape is their reason.
— Virginia Woolf
If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
— Alan Bennett
Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.
— Virginia Woolf
Lord, how tired one gets of one's own writing.
— Virginia Woolf
I live; I die; the sea comes over me; it's the blue that lasts.
— Virginia Woolf
It's better to break a man's leg than his heart.
— George Woolf
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
My notion's to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves.
— Virginia Woolf
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
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
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
To let the light of the world flood back-to say this has not happened!
But why turn one's head hither and thither? This is the truth. This is fact. — Virginia Woolf
But why turn one's head hither and thither? This is the truth. This is fact. — Virginia Woolf
Shakespeare's state of mind
— Virginia Woolf
It was January. Snow was falling; snow had fallen all day. The sky spread like a grey goose's wing from which feathers where falling all over England.
— Virginia Woolf
The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.
— Virginia Woolf
What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?
— Virginia Woolf
What a labour writing is ... making one sentence do the work of a page; that's what I call hard work.
— Virginia Woolf