Quotes by Virginia Woolf

About Virginia Woolf:

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling ...

Virginia Woolf

She came from the most worthless of classes - the rich, with a smattering of culture.

Virginia Woolf

Little Mr. Bowley, who had rooms in the Albany and was sealed with wax over the deeper sources of life but could be unsealed suddenly, inappropriately, sentimentally, by this sort of thing––poor women waiting to see the Queen go past––poor wo...

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

And her old Uncle William used to say a lady is known by her shoes and her gloves.

Virginia Woolf

Roses," she thought sardonically, "All trash, m’dear.

Virginia Woolf

Well, I’ve had my fun; I’ve had it, he thought, looking up at the swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed to atoms—his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this escapade with the girl; made up, as one mak...

Virginia Woolf

Those ruffians, the Gods, shan't have it all their own way,-- her notion being that the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and spoiling human lives were seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved like a lady.

Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway raised her hand to her eyes, and, as the maid shut the door to, and she heard the swish of Lucy's skirts, she felt like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response to old devotions.

Virginia Woolf

But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand's-breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking distance of the majest...

Virginia Woolf

She put on her lace collar. She put on her new hat and he never noticed; and he was happy without her.

Virginia Woolf

Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of man's soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bentl...

Virginia Woolf

(But he could not bring himself to say he loved her; not in so many words.)

Virginia Woolf

And the supreme mystery was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?

Virginia Woolf

Far rather would she that he were dead! She could not sit beside him when he stared so and did not see her and made everything terrible; sky and tree, children playing, dragging carts, blowing whistles, falling down; all were terrible. And he would n...

Virginia Woolf

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

...to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself.

Virginia Woolf

If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don’t do, one has to grope f...

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 ...

Virginia Woolf

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised...

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

Author Bio

  • NameVirginia Woolf
  • DescriptionEnglish writer
  • AliasesAdeline Virginia Woolf; Adeline Virginia Stephen
  • BornJanuary 25, 1882
  • DiedMarch 28, 1941
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWoman Of Letters; Novelist; Essayist; Autobiographer; Short Story Writer; Diarist; Literary Critic; Publisher
  • WorksTo The Lighthouse; Mrs Dalloway; Orlando: A Biography; A Room Of One's Own