Virginia Woolf Quotes

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well if one has not dined well.

I am rooted, but I flow.

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.

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

The eyes of others, our prisons; their thoughts, our cages.

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

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

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

Virginia Woolf Quotes part 2

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

The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well if one has not dined well.

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

We are not thinking beings walking up ladders of facts one after another, but a series of swift, flashing leaps from one dramatic crisis to another.

What does the brain matter compared with the heart?

We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next.

There is much added horror in life when a luminous word illuminates an intolerable scene.

All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea bird that opens its wings on the stake.

Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that.

Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

She had a 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.

Sometimes I’m so deeply buried under self-reproaches that I long for a word of praise to help me dig myself out again.

There should be a law, I thought, to make it compulsory for every one over fifteen to be in love at least once a year.”

One should be, I don’t know how to say it — I dislike saying perfectionist — but one should always remain something, someone with whom there are roads one can take. It’s nearly always when one is at the end of one’s rope that one suddenly understands everything.

It’s more than personal. It’s political.

Thinking is my fighting.

It’s in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

A woman may have a man’s face. Still faces are best.

Do not be afraid of Virginia Woolf!

What are you afraid of? Just open the door hesitantly and the biggest room you’ve ever seen will open up right in front of you.

I will not be ‘feminised,’ I will not be ‘emasculated’; I will simply be a person, one who acts in my own way, one who is true to myself.