Virginia Woolf Quotes

It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to talk. To follow the dark paths of the mind and enter the past, to visit books, to brush aside their branches and break off some fruit. ~ Virginia Woolf

The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published. ~ Virginia Woolf

There is, then, a world immune from change. But I am not composed enough, standing on tiptoe on the verge of fire, still scorched by the hot breath, afraid of the door opening and the leap of the tiger, to make even one sentence. What I say is perpetually contradicted. Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room. ~ Virginia Woolf

She has no body as others have. People have no meaning to her. She has no answer for them. Her mind steps into emptiness, alone. ~ Virginia Woolf

They start the day confident, braced, believing themselves desired at Miss Smith's tea party; they say to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they speak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have had such profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious notes in the margin of the private mind. ~ Virginia Woolf

Mr. Beerbohm in his way is perfect ... He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes ... He is without doubt the prince of his profession. ~ Virginia Woolf

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent. ~ Virginia Woolf

yet she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape, some folly. And whether it was pity, or their beauty, or that she was older, or some accident-like a faint scent, or a violin next door (so strange is the power of sounds at certain moments), she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt. ~ Virginia Woolf

I'm so odd, and I'm so limited, and I'm so different from the ordinary human being - so you say. I have a strong suspicion that I'm the simplest of you all, and that it's my extreme transparency that baffles you. I dont think I ever feel anything but the most ordinary emotions. ~ Virginia Woolf

Love had meant nothing to him but sawdust and cinders. ~ Virginia Woolf

The weight of the world is on our shoulders, its vision is through
our eyes; if we blink or look aside, or turn back to finger what
Plato said or remember Napoleon and his conquests, we inflict
on the world the injury of some obliquity. This is life ... ~ Virginia Woolf

Call it precious and go to hell, but I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence - especially if it occurs toward the end - or a mistake in paragraphing, even punctuation. Henry James is the maestro of the semicolon. Hemingway is a first-rate paragrapher. From the point of view of ear, Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence. I don't mean to imply that I successfully practice what I preach. I try, that's all. ~ Truman Capote

She was off like a bird, bullet, or arrow, impelled by what desire, shot by whom, at what directed, who could say? ~ Virginia Woolf

The greatest texts, I think, first dazzle, then with careful rereading, they instruct. I have learned from Virginia Woolf more than I even know how to articulate. ~ Lauren Groff

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe. ~ Virginia Woolf

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

Now then is my chance to find out what is of great importance, and I
must be careful, and tell no lies. ~ Virginia Woolf

You send a girl to school in order to make friends - the right sort. ~ Virginia Woolf

And it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody. ~ Virginia Woolf

So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then. One could be at one's ease. Mercifully one need not say, very briskly, crossing the lawn to great old Mrs. Beckwith, who would be coming out to find a corner to sit in, "Oh, good-morning, Mrs. Beckwith! What a lovely day! Are you going to be so bold as to sit in the sun? Jasper's hidden the chairs. Do let me find you one!" and all the rest of the usual chatter. One need not speak at all. One glided, one shook one's sails (there was a good deal of movement in the bay, boats were starting off) between things, beyond things. Empty it was not, but full to the brim. She seemed to be standing up to the lips in some substance, to move and float and sink in it, yes, for these waters were unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives. The Ramsays'; the children's; and all sorts of waifs and strays of things besides. A washerwoman with her basket; a rook; a red-hot poker; the purples and grey-greens of flowers: some common feeling held the whole. ~ Virginia Woolf

While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace. ~ Virginia Woolf

To know whom to write for is to know how to write. ~ Virginia Woolf

she was a pioneer, a stray, venturing, trusting. ~ Virginia Woolf

Before parting that night we agreed that the objects of life were to produce good people and good books. ~ Virginia Woolf

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders. ~ Virginia Woolf

She looked at Rose sitting between Jasper and Prue. How odd that one's child should do that! How odd to see them sitting there, in a row, her children, Jasper, Rose, Prue, Andrew, almost silent, but with some joke of their own going on, she guessed, from the twitching at their lips. It was something quite apart from everything else, something they were hoarding up to laugh over in their own room ... There was all that hoarded behind those rather set, still, mask like faces, for they did not join in easily; they were like watchers, surveyors, a little raised or set apart from the grown-up people. ~ Virginia Woolf

Women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time ... Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own. ~ Virginia Woolf

Everything is moving, falling, slipping, vanishing... There is a vast upheaval of matter. ~ Virginia Woolf

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for? ~ Virginia Woolf

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance ( ... ); as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out [in his History of England], she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room. ~ Virginia Woolf

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

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

[Final diary entry:] Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that it's seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down. ~ Virginia Woolf

And all the time Ralph was well aware that the bulk of Katharine was not represented in his dreams at all, so that when he met her he was bewildered by the fact that she had nothing to do with his dream of her. When, ~ Virginia Woolf

Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read. ~ Virginia Woolf

What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included. ~ Virginia Woolf

Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks - all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere. ~ Virginia Woolf

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

It was one of those unclassified affections of which there are so many. ~ Virginia Woolf

After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all. ~ Virginia Woolf

The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder. ~ Virginia Woolf

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life. ~ Virginia Woolf

With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past. ~ 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

Of Virginia Woolf: The talent of this generation which is most certain of survival. ~ Rebecca West

If there is a gay ghetto, then that's where James Baldwin is, and Thomas Mann is, and Virginia Woolf is, and that's the only place I would ever want to be. And that's not on the margins of the literary tradition: That's right at the heart of it. ~ Garth Greenwell

...a woman writing thinks back through her mothers. ~ Virginia Woolf

I see it all. I feel it all. I am inspired. My eyes fill with tears. Yet even as I feel this. I lash my frenzy higher and higher. It foams. It becomes artificial, insincere. Words and words and words, how they gallop - how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot fly with them, scattering women and string bags. There is some flaw in me - some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity ~ Virginia Woolf

I fear, I hate, I love, I envy and despise you […] ~ Virginia Woolf

Praise would be an insult to you. ~ Virginia Woolf

They were boastful, triumphant; it seemed to both that they had read every book in the world; known every sin, passion, and joy. Civilizations stood round them like flowers ready for picking. Ages lapped at their feet like waves fit for sailing. ~ Virginia Woolf

As a child I thought that I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old? I say to my joints, my iron-colored hair. Now I am older than my love, my departed friends. Perhaps I will live so long that the New York Public Library will be obliged to hand over the walking stick of Virginia Woolf. I would cherish it for her, and the stones in her pocket. But I would also keep on living, refusing to surrender my pen. ~ Patti Smith

Yet he too obsessed me for years. Until I wrote it out, I would find my lips moving; I would be arguing with him; raging against him; saying to myself all that I never said to him. How deep they drove themselves into me, the things it was impossible to say aloud. ~ Virginia Woolf

If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things. ~ Virginia Woolf

Dance music ... stirs some barbaric instinct - lulled asleep in our sober lives - you forget centuries of civilization in a second, & yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room. ~ Virginia Woolf

Indeed my aunt's legacy unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration, a view of the open sky. ~ Virginia Woolf

But language is wine upon his lips ~ Virginia Woolf

I will write," she had said, "what I enjoy writing. ~ Virginia Woolf

The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice. ~ Virginia Woolf

Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder? 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? And then what strange powers are these that penetrate our most secret ways and change our most treasured possessions without our willing it? Had Orlando, worn out by the extremity of his suffering, died for a week, and then come to life again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life? Having waited well over half an hour for an answer to these questions, and none coming, let us get on with the story. ~ Virginia Woolf

Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that ~ Virginia Woolf

Septimus has been working too hard - that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought. ~ Virginia Woolf

Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going. ~ Virginia Woolf

She held in her hands for one brief moment the globe which we spend our lives in trying to shape, round, whole, and entire from the confusion of chaos. ~ Virginia Woolf

The white spaces that lie between hour and hour ~ Virginia Woolf

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

I feel all shadows of the universe multiplied deep inside my skin. ~ Virginia Woolf

For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down. ~ Virginia Woolf

What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour - landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard ... ~ Virginia Woolf

Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading
I like reading books in the bulk. ~ Virginia Woolf

He remembered that, after digging for a little, the water oozes round your finger-tips; the hole then becomes a moat; a well; a spring; a secret channel to the sea. ~ Virginia Woolf

Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said, or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them. ~ Virginia Woolf

I skim through our notebook, thick with words, and then through our Facebook messages - so many now - and then I write a new one, quoting Virginia Woolf: Let us wander whirling to the gilt chairs. ... Are we not acceptable, moon? Are we not lovely sitting together here ... ? ~ Jennifer Niven

I have been longing for inner consistency. ~ Virginia Woolf

I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer? ~ Virginia Woolf

Nothing is stronger than the position of the dead among the living. ~ Virginia Woolf

But what might be written in the book which had rounded its edges off in his pocket, she did not know. What he thought they none of them knew. But he was absorbed in it, so that when he looked up, as he did now for an instant, it was not to see anything; it was to pin down some thought more exactly. That done, his mind flew back again and he plunged into his reading. He read, she thought, as if he were guiding something, or wheedling a large flock of sheep, or pushing his way up and up a single narrow path; and sometimes he went fast and straight, and broke his way through the bramble, and sometimes it seemed a branch struck at him, a bramble blinded him, but he was not going to let himself be beaten by that; on he went, tossing over page after page. ~ Virginia Woolf

Then why did she mind what he said? Women can't write, women can't paint--what did that matter coming from him, since clearly it was not true to him but for some reason helpful to him, and that was why he aid it? Why did her whole being bow, like corn under a wind, and erect itself again from this abasement only with a great and rather painful effort? She must make it once more. There's the sprig on the table-cloth; there's my painting; I must move the tree to the middle; that matters--nothing else. ~ Virginia Woolf

That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living. ~ Virginia Woolf

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

Come along,' she said. 'They're waiting.'
He had never felt so happy in the whole of his life! Without a word they made it up. They walked down to the lake. He had twenty minutes of perfect happiness. Her voice, her laugh, her dress (something floating, white, crimson), her spirit, her adventurousness; she made them all disembark and explore the island; she startled a hen; she laughed; she sang. And all the time, he knew perfectly well, Dalloway was falling in love with her; she was falling in love with Dalloway; but it didn't seem to matter. Nothing mattered. They sat on the ground and talked-he and Clarissa. They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort. And then in a second it was over. He said to himself as they were getting into the boat, 'She will marry that man,' dully, without any resentment; but it was an obvious thing. Dalloway would marry Clarissa. ~ Virginia Woolf

For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction are strictly limited ~ Virginia Woolf

But love...it's only an illusion. A story one makes up in one's mind about another person. And one knows all the time it isn't true. Of course one knows; why one's always taking care not to destroy the illusion. ~ Virginia Woolf

She was writing for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own ... ~ Virginia Woolf

Mr John Langdon Davies warns women 'that when children cease to be altogether desirable, women cease to be altogether necessary'. ~ Virginia Woolf

I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. ~ Virginia Woolf

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

I like her. She makes life interesting. She, herself, is interesting, I suppose. She talks right from the heart. I appreciate her frankness and I like the fact that she doesn't force the natural flow of a conversation. There's personality in her words. She thus gets to the core of things and that's important because with her - I can talk knowing that the talk is real! Oh believe me, it's amazingly real! And she also gives me the opportunity to listen as fully and completely as possible. And I can't seem to get her out of my head [ ... ] ~ Virginia Woolf

So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words. ~ Virginia Woolf

You must remember that fiction is the mirror of life. ~ Virginia Woolf

Possible then the professor inited a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of omen, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his superiority. ~ Virginia Woolf

And as it went on I set it against the background of that other talk, and as I matched the two together I had no doubt that one was the descendant, the legitimate heir of the other. ~ Virginia Woolf

Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her - who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world? ~ Virginia Woolf

Or there were the poets and thinkers. Suppose he had had that passion, and had gone to Sir William Bradshaw, a great doctor yet to her extremely evil, without sex or lust, extremely polite to women, but capable of some indescribable outrage - forcing your soul, that was it - if this young man had gone to him, and Sir William impressed him, like that, with his power, might he not then have said (indeed she felt it now), Life is made intolerable; they make life intolerable, men like that? ~ Virginia Woolf

Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?
startling, unexpected, unknown? ~ Virginia Woolf

All extremes of feeling are allied with madness. ~ Virginia Woolf

The random talk of people who have no chance of immortality and thus can speak their minds out has a setting, often, of lights, streets, houses, human beings, beautiful or grotesque, which will weave itself into the moment for ever. ~ Virginia Woolf

There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over tree-tops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities. What is to come? I know not. But, as I put down my glass I remember; I am engaged to be married. I am to dine with my friends tonight. I am Bernard. ~ Virginia Woolf

I am not one and simple, but complex and many. ~ Virginia Woolf