Virginia Woolf Quotes & Sayings

Yes, our old age is not going to be sunny orchard drowse. By shutting down the fire curtain, though, I find I can live in the moment; which is good; why yield a moment to regret or envy or worry? Why indeed? (24 December 1940) — Virginia Woolf

Either I shall find it, or I shall not find it. I examine my note-case. I look in all my pockets. These are the things that forever interrupt the process upon which I am eternally engaged of finding some perfect phrase that fits this moment exactly. — Virginia Woolf

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking. — 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

One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. — Virginia Woolf

I need solitude. I need space. I need air. I need the empty fields round me; and my legs pounding along roads; and sleep; and animal existence. — Virginia Woolf

Suddenly, as if the movement of his hand had released it, the load of her accumulated impressions of him tilted up, and down poured in a ponderous avalanche all she felt about him. — Virginia Woolf

I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes,
or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments
of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve
my body springs out and seizes me and stops me , here, before
this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference
descends. — Virginia Woolf

Her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it — Virginia Woolf

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work. — Virginia Woolf

Being an artist:
And this susceptibility of theirs is doubly unfortunate , I thought, returning again to my original enquiry into what state of mind is propitious for creative work, because the mind of an artist, in order to achieve to the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent, like Shakespeare's mind, I conjectured, looking at the book which lay open at Antony and Cleopatra. There must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed. — Virginia Woolf

I have lost friends, some by death - Percival - others through sheer inability to cross the street. — Virginia Woolf

But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he. — Virginia Woolf

The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer. — Virginia Woolf

He should be very proud of Andrew if he got a scholarship, he said. She would be just as proud of him if he didn't, she answered. They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did. — Virginia Woolf

For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of
to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. — Virginia Woolf

As nobody can possibly tell me whether one's writing is bad or good, the only certain value is one's own pleasure. I am sure of that. — Virginia Woolf

I've seen more trouble come from long engagements than from any other forms of human folly. — Virginia Woolf

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

What amulet is there against this disaster? What face can I summon to lay cool upon this heat? — Virginia Woolf

I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases. — Virginia Woolf

But the noise!" she said. "The noise!" "The sign of a successful party. — Virginia Woolf

Love ought to stop on both sides, don't you think, simultaneously?' He spoke without any stress on the words, so as not to wake the sleepers. 'But it won't - that's the devil,' he added in the same undertone. — Virginia Woolf

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

At last the play was ended. All had grown dark. The tears streamed down his face. Looking up into the sky there was nothing but blackness there too. Ruin and death, he thought, cover all. The life of man ends in the grave. Worms devour us. Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe Should yawn - — Virginia Woolf

Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. — Virginia Woolf

In the 18th century we knew how everything was done, but here I rise through the air, I listen to voices in America, I see men flying- but how is it done? I can't even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns. — Virginia Woolf

It is from the middle class that writers spring, because, it is in the middle class only that the practice of writing is as natural and habitual as hoeing a field or building a house. — Virginia Woolf

And there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect, thought Clarissa, watching him open the door; for one would not part with it oneself, or take it, against his will, from one's husband, without losing one's independence, one's self-respect - something, after all, priceless. — Virginia Woolf

He was afraid he did not understand beauty apart form human beings. — Virginia Woolf

Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact. Therefore — Virginia Woolf

And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, "Poor old Augustus--he's a true poet," which was high praise from her husband. — Virginia Woolf

She looked pale, mysterious, like a lily, drowned under water, he thought. — Virginia Woolf

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. — Virginia Woolf

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. — Virginia Woolf

Naturally men are drowned in a storm, but it is a perfectly straightforward affair, and the depths of the sea are only water after all. — Virginia Woolf

The mind of man works with 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 by 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

I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person. — Virginia Woolf

Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now. — Virginia Woolf

What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever. — Virginia Woolf

Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. — Virginia Woolf

Life's what you see in people's eyes; life's what they learn, and, having learnt it, never, though they seek to hide it, cease to be aware of
what? That life's like that, it seems. — Virginia Woolf

There was no treachery too base for the world to commit. — Virginia Woolf

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

But what answer? Well that the soul - for she was conscious of a movement in her of some creature beating its way about her and trying to escape which momentarily she called the soul - is by nature unmated, a widow bird; a bird perched aloof on that tree.
But then Bertram, putting his arm through hers in his familiar way, for he had known her all her life, remarked that they were not doing their duty and must go in.
At that moment, in some back street or public house, the usual terrible sexless, inarticulate voice rang out; a shriek, a cry. And the widow bird, startled, flew away, describing wider and wider circles until it became (what she called her soul) remote as a crow which has been startled up into the air by a stone thrown at it. — Virginia Woolf

It was long before they moved, and when they moved it was with great reluctance. They stood together in front of the looking-glass, and with a brush tried to make themselves look as if they had been feeling nothing all the morning, neither pain nor happiness. But it chilled them to see themselves in the glass, for instead of being vast and indivisible they were really very small and separate, the size of the glass leaving a large space for the reflection of other things. — Virginia Woolf

A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand. — Virginia Woolf

For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately. — Virginia Woolf

We insist, it seems, on living. — Virginia Woolf

She was feeling reckless; nothing that she did mattered. She walked to the window and twitched the curtain apart. There were the stars pricked in little holes in the blue-black sky. There was a row of chimney-pots against the sky. Then the stars. Inscrutable, eternal, indifferent - those were the words; the right words. But I don't feel it, she said, looking at the stars. So why pretend to? What they're really like, she thought, screwing up her eyes to look at them, is little bits of frosty steel. And the moon - there it was - is a polished dish-cover. But she felt nothing, even when she had reduced moon and stars to that. — Virginia Woolf

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves. — Virginia Woolf

I see the mountains in the sky; the great clouds; and the moon; I have a great and astonishing sense of something there, which is "it" - it is not exactly beauty that I mean. It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory, achieved. A sense of my own strangeness, walking on the earth is there too: of the infinite oddity of the human position; with the moon up there and those mountain clouds. — Virginia Woolf

Unpraised, I find it hard to start writing in the morning; but the dejection lasts only 30 minutes, and once I start I forget all about it. One should aim, seriously, at disregarding ups and downs; a compliment here, a silence there;[ ... ] the central fact remains stable, which is the fact of my own pleasure in the art. — Virginia Woolf

It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life. — Virginia Woolf

But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the teashop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him- he could not feel. He could reason; he could read, Dante for example, quite easily ... he could add up his bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then- that he could not feel. — Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Hilbery would have been perfectly well able to sustain herself if the world had been what the world is not. She was beautifully adapted for life in another planet. — Virginia Woolf

The summer is put away folded up in the drawer with other summers. — Virginia Woolf

Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face - as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; and thought. — Virginia Woolf

This is my right; it is the right of every human being. I choose not the suffocating anesthetic of the suburbs, but the violent jolt of the Capital, that is my choice. The meanest patient, yes, even the very lowest is allowed some say in the matter of her own prescription. Thereby she defines her humanity. I wish, for your sake, Leonard, I could be happy in this quietness. [pause]But if it is a choice between Richmond and death, I choose death.. — Virginia Woolf

Oh, yes, dear reader: the essay is alive. There is no reason to despair. — Virginia Woolf

But with you I am deeply passionately, unrequitedly in love. — Virginia Woolf

How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers. — Virginia Woolf

A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing. — Virginia Woolf

The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. — Virginia Woolf

(June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young. Messages were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty. Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that.) — Virginia Woolf

Each of the ladies, being after the fashion of their sex, highly trained in promoting men's talk without listening to it, could think - about the education of children, about the use of fog sirens in an opera - without betraying herself. Only it struck Helen that Rachel was perhaps too still for a hostess, and that she might have done something with her hands. — Virginia Woolf

When the white arm rests upon the knee it is a triangle; now it is upright - a column; now a fountain, falling. It makes no sign, it does not beckon, it does not see us. Behind it roars the sea. It is beyond our reach. Yet there I venture. There I go to replenish my emptiness, to stretch my nights and fill them fuller and fuller with dreams. And for a second even now, even here, I reach my object and say, Wander no more. All is trial and make-believe. Here is the end. — Virginia Woolf

Life stand still here. — Virginia Woolf

Oh, to awake from dreaming! — Virginia Woolf

That complete statement which is literature. — Virginia Woolf

Why, after all, did she do these things? why seek pinnacles and stand drenched in fire? Might it consume her anyhow! Burn her to cinders! Better anything, better brandish one's torch and hurl it to earth than taper and dwindle away ... — Virginia Woolf

Women made civilisation impossible with all their "charm " all their silliness. — Virginia Woolf

Scarcely a human being in the course of history has fallen to a woman's rifle; the vast majority of birds and beasts have been killed by you, not by us. Obviously there is for you some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting which we have never felt or enjoyed. — Virginia Woolf

One does not love a place the less because one has suffered in it. — Virginia Woolf

There is a code of behavior, she knew, whose seventh article (it may be) says that on occasions of this sort it behooves the woman, whatever her own occupation may be, to go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs, of his vanity, of his urgent desire to assert himself; as indeed it is their duty, she reflected, in her old maidenly fairness, to help us, suppose the Tube were to burst into flames. Then, she thought, I should certainly expect Mr. Tansley to get me out. But how would it be, she thought, if neither of us did either of these things? So she sat there smiling. — Virginia Woolf

So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof, a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, 'This is he,' or, 'This is she. — Virginia Woolf

Thoughts are divine. — Virginia Woolf

There shall I recover beauty, and impose order upon my raked, my dishevelled soul? But what can one make in loneliness? Alone I should stand on the empty grass and say, Rooks fly — Virginia Woolf

But I don't think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age. — Virginia Woolf

It was the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind indelibly. — Virginia Woolf

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. — Virginia Woolf

Sir, I would trust you with my heart. Moreover, we have left our bodies in the banqueting hall. Those on the turf are the shadows of our souls. — Virginia Woolf

It was toffee; they were advertising toffee, a nursemaid told Rezia. Together they spell t ... o ... f ...
"K ... R ... " said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say "Kay Arr" close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper's, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke. A marvellous discovery indeed - that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life! — Virginia Woolf

Like all feelings felt for oneself, Mrs. Ramsay thought, it made one sad. It was so inadequate, what one could give in return; and what Rose felt was quite out of proportion to anything she actually was. — Virginia Woolf

It has the permanent quality of literature. — Virginia Woolf

We are all swept on by the torrent of things grown so familiar that they cast no shade. — Virginia Woolf

Mr. Denham cursed himself very sharply for having exchanged the freedom of the street for this sophisticated drawing-room, — Virginia Woolf

No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. — Virginia Woolf

The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpended the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a fingerprint of a shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside. — Virginia Woolf

It's been a perpetual discovery, my life. A miracle. — Virginia Woolf

Habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play. — 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

Though the wind is rough and blowing in their faces, those girls there, striding hand in hand, shouting out a song, seem to feel neither cold nor shame. They are hatless. They triumph. — Virginia Woolf

Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. — Virginia Woolf

What a lark! What a plunge! — Virginia Woolf

She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. — Virginia Woolf

His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at their feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet. — Virginia Woolf

Let me now raise my song of glory. Heaven be praised for solitude. Let me be alone. Let me cast and throw away this veil of being, this cloud that changes with the least breath, night and day, and all night and all day. While I sat here I have been changing. I have watched the sky change. I have seen clouds cover the stars, then free the stars, then cover the stars again. Now I look at their changing no more. Now no one sees me and I change no more. Heaven be praised for solitude that has removed the pressure of the eye, the solicitation of the body, and all need of lies and phrases — Virginia Woolf

I am wrapped round with phrases, like damp straw; I glow, phosphorescent. — Virginia Woolf

But china is seldom thrown from a great height; it is one of the rarest of human actions. You have to find in conjunction a very high house, and a woman of such reckless impulse and passionate prejudice that she flings her jar or pot straight from the window without thought of who is below. — Virginia Woolf