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

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

Virginia Woolf

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.

Virginia Woolf

You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort.

Virginia Woolf

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

Virginia Woolf

If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will no...

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

It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.

Virginia Woolf

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

Virginia Woolf

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 h...

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

now that one was mature then, said Peter, one could watch, one could understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling, he said. No, that is true, said Sally. She felt more deeply, more passionately, every year. It increased, he said, alas, perha...

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.

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

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

Virginia Woolf

All raw, uncooked, protesting." (on Aldous Huxley)

Virginia Woolf

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes

Virginia Woolf

For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.

Virginia Woolf

The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

Virginia Woolf

A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his f...

Virginia Woolf

…the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea…. It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus compelling words to a shape…. You have not finished with it because you...

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