Virginia Woolf Quotes

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

If we didn't live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.

At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.

But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.

I am volatile for one, rigid for another, angular as an icicle in silver, or voluptuous as a candle flame in gold.

Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.

I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.

I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.

Yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.

Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.

We must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments.

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.

He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above his paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged with existence.

The depths of the sea are only water after all.

Night had come—night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day.

And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.

I mean it's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.

I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.

I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.

As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better.

As a woman, I have no country

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.

It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality.

Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.

My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.

Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.

Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure

But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.

What is a woman? I assure you, I do not know ... I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.

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.

The way to write well is to live intensely.

The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman.

Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.

Her life-that was the only chance she had-the short season between two silences.

A perfect treat must include a trip to a second-hand bookshop.

She was like a crinkled poppy; with the desire to drink dry dust.

Soup is cuisines kindest course

Thoughts without words… Can that be?

For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.

Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.

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

How can I express the darkness?

literature is the record of our discontent.