Virginia Woolf quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Virginia Woolf on Wise Famous Quotes.

Was she not forgetting again how strongly she influenced people?

The way to write well is to live intensely.

I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony.

I belong to quick, futile moments of intense feeling. Yes, I belong to moments. Not to people.

Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?

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.

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.

Alone, over my dead fire, I tend to see the thin places in my own stories.

We carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.

Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

London thou art a jewel of jewels, & jasper of jocunditie -- music, talk, friendship, city views, books, publishing, something central & inexplicable.

Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day

So that was the end of that marriage.

It is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people ... Think of things in themselves.

I am not going to lie down and weep away a life of care.

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?

Nothing is stronger than the position of the dead among the living.

He went on saying "No" to her, on principle, for he never yielded to a woman on account of her sex.

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

It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe. All is ripling,
all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph.

How much, let me note, depends upon trousers; the intelligent head is entirely handicapped by shabby trousers.

Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?

I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you.

Romantic Love is only an Illusion. A story one makes up in One's Mind about Another Person.

I got out this diary and read, as one always reads one's own writing; with a kind of guilty intensity.

This diminished the entire joy, the pure joy, of the two notes sounding together, and let the sound die on her ear now with a dismal flatness.

Time flaps on the mast--

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

The chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of-man.

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

Fending for oneself alone on a desert island is really no laughing matter. It is no crying one either

One must love everything.

For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying
what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must simply say what one felt.

But the close withdrew: the hand softened. It was over
the moment.

To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people's eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

Habits gradually change the face of one's life as time changes one's physical face; & one does not know it.

As an experience, madness is terrific ... and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.

I love and I hate. I desire one thing only.

Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.

No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion.

[2] or directing a stern and momentous enterprise in some crisis of

I'm convinced people are wrong when they say it's work that wears one; it's responsibility.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Queer," I mused, "to see what we were thinking five years ago.

Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.

Women alone stir my imagination ...

It is the speed, the hot, molten effect, the lava flow of sentence into sentence that I need.

In this case, a mother, noted for her beauty, might be reduced to a purple shadow ... (Tansley to Lily on her painting of the house & grounds)

Literature had taken possession even of her memories. She was matching him, presumably, with certain characters in the old novels ...

To leave a door shut that might be open is in my eyes some form of blasphemy.

Desiring truth, awaiting it, laboriously distilling a few words, forever desiring

The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.

Here, she felt, putting the spoon down, was the still space that lies about the heart of things, where one could move or rest ...

One must own that there are certain books which can be read without the mind and without the heart, but still with considerable enjoyment.

Life without illusion is a ghostly affair.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface.

One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun.

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

There are some books that LIVE," she mused. "They are young with us, and they grow old with us.

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

And then she said to herself, brandishing her sword at life, nonsense.

You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a pleasant one.

To Look Life in the Face ... !!!

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art

Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time.

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

She would not say of anyone that they were this or that.

. . . to walk alone in London is the greatest rest.

It was only by scorning all she met that she kept herself from tears, and the friction of people brushing past her was evidently painful.

I [who] am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement ...

Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.

to teach without zest is a crime.

These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom.

The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.

I'm not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and arrows of sadness.

An immense pressure is on me. I cannot move without dislodging the weight of centuries.

To make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action.

We scarcely want to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.

The body after long illness is languid, passive, receptive of sweetness, but too weak to contain it.

The white spaces that lie between hour and hour

I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.

I am rooted, but I flow.

To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.

Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life?

But the Daily Mail isn't to be trusted," Jacob said to himself, looking about for something else to read.

War is a man's game ... the killing machine has a gender and it is male.

The brain is always thinking, but who is it who is thinking?

I like going from one lighted room to another, such is my brain to me; lighted rooms.

I prefer men to cauliflowers

I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.

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.

I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass

She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged

They never saw him drawing pictures of them naked at their antics in his notebook.

For such gestures one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime