quotes by Virginia Woolf

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman. "
— Virginia Woolf

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life."
— Virginia Woolf

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. "
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

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

"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."
— Virginia Woolf

"Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?"
— Virginia Woolf

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

"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 Room of One's Own (Bloomsbury Classic))

"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 (Orlando)

"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. "
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own (Penguin Modern Classics))

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

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

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

"If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people"
— Virginia Woolf

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

"Books are the mirrors of the soul."
— Virginia Woolf (Between the Acts (Harvest Book))

"She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day."
— Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)

"An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know.

All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was!-that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant . . ."
— Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)

"I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street."
— Virginia Woolf