110+ Virginia Woolf Quotes On Writing, Self And Feminism

Virginia Woolf was an iconic British author, best known for her modernist novels such as Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. She was a key figure in the Bloomsbury Group, a collective of writers, philosophers, and artists in the early 20th century. Woolf was a pioneer of the stream of consciousness writing style and her works are still widely read and studied today. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Virginia Woolf on writing, love, life.

Top 10 Virginia Woolf Quotes

1. She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.
2. You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
3. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
4. I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.
5. Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
6. I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
7. The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.
8. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
9. The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
10. Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

Virginia Woolf Image Quotes

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. — Virginia Woolf

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. — Virginia Woolf

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. — Virginia Woolf

Language is wine upon the lips. — Virginia Woolf

As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world. — Virginia Woolf

The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering. — Virginia Woolf

Arrange whatever pieces come your way. — Virginia Woolf

For nothing was simply one thing. — Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Short Quotes

• Language is wine upon the lips.
• As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
• Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
• For nothing was simply one thing.
• I'm terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.
• Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.
• When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?
• I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.
• To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
• The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; My thoughts follow the exact same process.

Virginia Woolf Quotes About Writing

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

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. — Virginia Woolf

As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall. — Virginia Woolf

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

For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver. — Virginia Woolf

Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand. — Virginia Woolf

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print. — Virginia Woolf

Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? — Virginia Woolf

I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity. — Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Quotes About Love

Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you — Virginia Woolf

Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence. — Virginia Woolf

When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading. — Virginia Woolf

Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night. — Virginia Woolf

For love... has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together — Virginia Woolf

But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people. — Virginia Woolf

what she loved: life, London, this moment of june. — Virginia Woolf

... if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us to break her and bullyher, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured. — 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

Communication is truth; communication is happiness. To share is our duty; to go down boldly and bring to light those hidden thoughts which are the most diseased; to conceal nothing; to pretend nothing; if we are ignorant to say so; if we love our friends to let them know it. — Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Quotes About Life

The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general. — Virginia Woolf

How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger? — Virginia Woolf

In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us. — Virginia Woolf

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

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

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

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

It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality. — 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

Virginia Woolf Quotes About War

If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? -- not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers? — Virginia Woolf

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. — Virginia Woolf

We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods. — Virginia Woolf

The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers. — Virginia Woolf

History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men. — Virginia Woolf

if newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art. — Virginia Woolf

War is not women's history. — Virginia Woolf

war is a man's game ... the killing machine has a gender and it is male. — Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Quotes About Books

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. — Virginia Woolf

Books are the mirrors of the soul. — Virginia Woolf

Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers. — Virginia Woolf

Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title. — Virginia Woolf

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title. — Virginia Woolf

At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world. — Virginia Woolf

Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people. — Virginia Woolf

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out. — Virginia Woolf

Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages? — Virginia Woolf

They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within. — Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Quotes About Reading

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination. — Virginia Woolf

For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. — Virginia Woolf

We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly. — Virginia Woolf

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied? — 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

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

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. — Virginia Woolf

writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial. — Virginia Woolf

I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber. — Virginia Woolf

I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it. — Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Quotes About Art

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art. — Virginia Woolf

The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea. — Virginia Woolf

You cannot cross the narrow bridge of art carrying all its tools in your hands. Some you must leave behind. — Virginia Woolf

One should aim, seriously, at disregarding ups and downs; a compliment here, silence there ... the central fact remains stable, which is the fact of my own pleasure in the art. — Virginia Woolf

What is a woman? I assure you, I do not know ... I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill. — Virginia Woolf

Intimacy is a difficult art. — Virginia Woolf

Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the — Virginia Woolf

It is probable that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man. — Virginia Woolf

Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough. — Virginia Woolf

Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction? — Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Quotes About Feminist

All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are sides, and it is necessary for one side to beat another side. — Virginia Woolf

A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life — Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf Quotes About People

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. — 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

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. — Virginia Woolf

It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done. — Virginia Woolf

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

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

Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake? — Virginia Woolf

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice. — Virginia Woolf

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. — Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Quotes About Mind

I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded. — Virginia Woolf

The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering. — Virginia Woolf

I like the unreality of your mind; the whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd. — Virginia Woolf

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. — Virginia Woolf

For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year? — Virginia Woolf

But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness. — Virginia Woolf

Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will. — Virginia Woolf

The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent...there must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed. — 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

My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way. — Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Quotes About Truth

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity. — Virginia Woolf

Be truthful, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting. — Virginia Woolf

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

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth. — Virginia Woolf

Illness is a part of every human being's experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals. — 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

By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life. — Virginia Woolf

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say. — Virginia Woolf

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully? — Virginia Woolf

At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial-and any question about sex is that-one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. — Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Famous Quotes And Sayings

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. — Virginia Woolf

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. — Virginia Woolf

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. — Virginia Woolf

How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself. — Virginia Woolf

The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. — Virginia Woolf

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 certain that I'm going mad again, I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices — Virginia Woolf

As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world. — Virginia Woolf

The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering. — Virginia Woolf

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. — 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

Arrange whatever pieces come your way. — Virginia Woolf

For nothing was simply one thing. — Virginia Woolf

He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together. — Virginia Woolf

But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors. — Virginia Woolf

Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day. — Virginia Woolf

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly. — 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

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

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them. — Virginia Woolf

Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust. — Virginia Woolf

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

Ruin, weariness, death, perpetually death, stand grimly to confront the other presence of Elizabethan drama which is life: life compact of frigates, fir trees and ivory, of dolphins and the juice of July flowers, of the milk of unicorns and panthers’ breath, of ropes of pearl, brains of peacocks and Cretan wine. — Virginia Woolf

Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea. — Virginia Woolf

Above all you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the ever-changing and turning world. — Virginia Woolf

What does the brain matter compared with the heart? — Virginia Woolf

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

I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore. — Virginia Woolf

Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement. — Virginia Woolf

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. — Virginia Woolf

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. — Virginia Woolf

Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others. — Virginia Woolf

At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials. — Virginia Woolf

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. — Virginia Woolf

Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! — 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

I prefer men to cauliflowers — Virginia Woolf

I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific. — 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

Like all very handsome men who die tragically, he left not so much a character behind him as a legend. Youth and death shed a halo through which it is difficult to see a real face. — Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. — Virginia Woolf

To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again! — 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 we didn't live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged. — 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

What is meant by reality? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable -- now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying — Virginia Woolf

I am volatile for one, rigid for another, angular as an icicle in silver, or voluptuous as a candle flame in gold. — Virginia Woolf

The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare. — Virginia Woolf

Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart. — Virginia Woolf

But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory. — Virginia Woolf

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

Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy. — Virginia Woolf

I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure. — Virginia Woolf

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father. — Virginia Woolf

Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously. — Virginia Woolf

Life Lessons by Virginia Woolf

1. Virginia Woolf taught us to value our own creative potential and to strive to be true to ourselves and our innermost thoughts.
2. She encouraged us to be open to new experiences, to be curious and to explore the world around us.
3. She also taught us to be mindful of our mental health and to take time for ourselves to rest and reflect.