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

It has the permanent quality of literature.

Virginia Woolf

The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds ...

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 lo...

Virginia Woolf

When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?

Virginia Woolf

To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away...

Virginia Woolf

Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered

Virginia Woolf

I burn, I shiver, out of this sun, into this shadow.

Virginia Woolf

Pale, with dark hair, the one who is coming is melancholy, romantic. And I am arch and fluent and capricious; for he is melancholy, he is romantic. He is here.

Virginia Woolf

Is it not possible — I often wonder — that things we have felt with great intensity have an experience independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible, in time, that some device will be invented by whi...

Virginia Woolf

For we think back through our mothers if we are women.

Virginia Woolf

I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual

Virginia Woolf

The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; My thoughts follow the exact same process.

Virginia Woolf

What people had had shed and left--a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes--those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks ...

Virginia Woolf

Ho talvolta sognato che, quando verra' il giorno del Giudizio, l'Onnipotente dira' a Pietro, vedendoci arrivare con i nostri libri sotto braccio: "Guarda, questi non hanno bisogno di alcun compenso. Non abbiamo nulla da dare loro. Questi hanno amato ...

Virginia Woolf

But how are you going to get out, into the world of other people? That is your problem now, if I may hazard a guess — to find the right relationship, now that you know yourself, between the self that you know and the world outside. It is a difficul...

Virginia Woolf

Whenever you see a board up with "Trespassers will be prosecuted," trespass at once.

Virginia Woolf

the battered woman--for she wore a skirt--with her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love--love which has lasted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of years ago, her lover, who had been dea...

Virginia Woolf

If you drink the good wine of the noble countess, you have to entertain her less desirable friends.

Virginia Woolf

Flinging himself from his horse, he made, in his rage, as if he would breast the flood. Standing knee-deep in water he hurled at the faithless woman all the insults that have ever been the lot of her sex. Faithless, mutable, fickle, he called her; de...

Virginia Woolf

As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.

Virginia Woolf

My head is a hive of words that won't settle.

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