Virginia Woolf Quotes

“...for unless I am myself, I am nobody.”
― Virginia Woolf, Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer, I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge.”
― Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf : Complete Works 8 novels, 3 ‘biographies’, 46 short stories, 606 essays, 1 play, her diary and some letters

“Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex—woman, that is to say—also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women.”
― Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf: Complete Works (OBG Classics): Inspired 'A Ghost Story' (2017) directed by David Lowery

“The most monstrous monster is the monster with noble feelings”
― Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf : Complete Works 8 novels, 3 ‘biographies’, 46 short stories, 606 essays, 1 play, her diary and some letters

“But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.”
― Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf: The Complete Works

“As for the other experiences, the solitary ones, which people go through alone, in their bedrooms, in their offices, walking the fields and the streets of London, he had them; had left home, a mere boy, because of his mother; she lied; because he came down to tea for the fiftieth time with his hands unwashed; because he could see no future for a poet in Stroud; and so, making a confidant of his little sister, had gone to London leaving an absurd note behind him, such as great men have written, and the world has read later when the story of their struggles has become famous. London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith; thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like Septimus with which their parents have thought to distinguish them. Lodging off the Euston Road, there were experiences, again experiences, such as change a face in two years from a pink innocent oval to a face lean, contracted, hostile. But of all this what could the most observant of friends have said except what a gardener says when he opens the conservatory door in the morning and finds a new blossom on his plant: — It has flowered; flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual seeds, which all muddled up (in a room off the Euston Road), made him shy, and stammering, made him anxious to improve himself, made him fall in love with Miss Isabel Pole, lecturing in the Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare. Was he not like Keats? she asked; and reflected how she might give him a taste of Antony and Cleopatra and the rest; lent him books; wrote him scraps of letters; and lit in him”
― Virginia Woolf, Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

“So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball.”
― Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf : Complete Works 8 novels, 3 ‘biographies’, 46 short stories, 606 essays, 1 play, her diary and some letters

“That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.”
― Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf: The Complete Collection

“I want to lie down like a tired child and weep away this life - and my diary shall receive me on its downy pillow. Most children do not know what they cry for; nor do I altogether.”
― Virginia Woolf, Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

“Indeed he seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people, born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle’s. His understanding often astonished her. But did he notice the flowers? No. Did he notice the view? No. Did he even notice his own daughter’s beauty, or whether there was pudding on his plate or roast beef? He would sit at table with them like a person in a dream.”
― Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf : Complete Works 8 novels, 3 ‘biographies’, 46 short stories, 606 essays, 1 play, her diary and some letters

“And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. “About life, about death; about Mrs. Ramsay”—no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? (She was looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked extraordinarily empty). It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind. The physical sensations that went with the bare look of the steps had become suddenly extremely unpleasant. 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, Virginia Woolf: The Complete Works

“No going to the Lighthouse, James,” he said, as he stood by the window, speaking awkwardly, but trying in deference to Mrs. Ramsay to soften his voice into some semblance of geniality at least. Odious little man, thought Mrs. Ramsay, why go on saying that?”
― Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf: The Complete Works

“The very reason why that poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now.”
― Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf: The Complete Collection

“All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.”
― Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf: The Complete Collection

“She was robbing no one of anything, and yet, to get so much pleasure from simple things, such as eating one’s breakfast alone in a room which had nice colours in it, clean from the skirting of the boards to the corners of the ceiling, seemed to suit her so thoroughly that she used at first to hunt about for some one to apologize to,”
― Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf: Complete Works (OBG Classics): Inspired 'A Ghost Story' (2017) directed by David Lowery

“and rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze. Through all ages — when the pavement was grass, when it was swamp, through the age of tusk and mammoth, through the age of silent sunrise, 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 dead these centuries, had walked, she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone; death’s enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her side a bunch of purple-heather, there on her high burial place which the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the pageant of the universe would be over.”
― Virginia Woolf, Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

“you are an immensely ancient, complex, and continuous character, for which reason please treat yourself with respect and”
― Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf : Complete Works 8 novels, 3 ‘biographies’, 46 short stories, 606 essays, 1 play, her diary and some letters

“Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable — and life is more than a dream” — she”
― Virginia Woolf, Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

“She was feeling reckless; nothing that she did mattered. She walked to the window and twitched the curtain apart. There were the stars pricked in little holes in the blue-black sky. There was a row of chimney-pots against the sky. Then the stars. Inscrutable, eternal, indifferent—those were the words; the right words. But I don’t feel it, she said, looking at the stars. So why pretend to? What they’re really like, she thought, screwing up her eyes to look at them, is little bits of frosty steel. And the moon—there it was—is a polished dish-cover. But she felt nothing, even when she had reduced moon and stars to that.”
― Virginia Woolf, Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

“marriage. The other thing, after all, came so much”
― Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf : Complete Works 8 novels, 3 ‘biographies’, 46 short stories, 606 essays, 1 play, her diary and some letters

“The summer wealth of cultivation is over; & the earth is preparing for her time of sleep & slow reproduction.”
― Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf: The Complete Works

“(For it is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they can only say ‘good to eat’ when they mean ‘beautiful’ and the other way about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves.)”
― Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf: The Complete Collection

“and then he would try to think for half an hour,—or was it two years and a half?—how to say simply in so many words what love is.”
― Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf: The Complete Collection

“Strength, grace, romance, folly, poetry, youth—she read him like a page.”
― Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf: The Complete Works

“Oddly enough, she was one of the most thorough-going sceptics he had ever met, and possibly (this was a theory he used to make up to account for her, so transparent in some ways, so inscrutable in others), possibly she said to herself, As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship (her favourite reading as a girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and they were fond of these nautical metaphors), as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners (Huxley again); decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can. 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, Virginia Woolf: The Complete Works

“Helen agreed. “So now you can go ahead and be a person on your own account,” she added. The vision of her own personality, of herself as a real everlasting thing, different from anything else, unmergeable, like the sea or the wind, flashed into Rachel’s mind, and she became profoundly excited at the thought of living. “I can be m-m-myself,” she stammered, “in spite of you, in spite of the Dalloways, and Mr. Pepper, and Father, and my Aunts, in spite of these?” She swept her hand across a whole page of statesmen and soldiers. “In spite of them all,” said Helen gravely.”
― Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf: The Complete Works

“As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist, lawyers’ clerks will have to make flying leaps into the mud; young lady typists will have to fidget behind you. In the streets of London where beauty goes unregarded, eccentricity must pay the penalty, and it is better not to be very tall, to wear a long blue cloak, or to beat the air with your left hand.”
― Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf: The Complete Works

“waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of….”
― Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf: The Complete Collection

“Yet rumours were at once in circulation from the middle of Bond Street to Oxford Street on one side, to Atkinson’s scent shop on the other, passing invisibly, inaudibly, like a cloud, swift, veil-like upon hills, falling indeed with something of a cloud’s sudden sobriety and stillness upon faces which a second before had been utterly disorderly.”
― Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf: The Complete Works

“How much she wanted it—that people should look pleased as she came in, Clarissa thought and turned and walked back towards Bond Street, annoyed, because it was silly to have other reasons for doing things. Much rather would she have been one of those people like Richard who did things for themselves, whereas, she thought, waiting to cross, half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew (and now the policeman held up his hand) for no one was ever for a second taken in.”
― Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf: The Complete Works