Top 500 Virginia Woolf Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I am rooted, but I flow.”

— Virginia Woolf

2. “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Peace Quotes

3. “No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”

— Virginia Woolf

4. “Books are the mirrors of the soul.”

— Virginia Woolf

5. “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”

— Virginia Woolf

6. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

7. “Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

9. “Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”

— Virginia Woolf

10. “Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Quotes About Writing, Soul Quotes

12. “I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Quotes About Reality, Quotes About Stars, Romantic Quotes

13. “Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

14. “Thinking is my fighting.”

— Virginia Woolf

15. “A light here required a shadow there.”

— Virginia Woolf

16. “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

17. “I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.”

— Virginia Woolf

18. “It’s my choice, to choose how to live my life.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Honesty Quotes

20. “What does the brain matter compared with the heart?”

— Virginia Woolf

21. “Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.”

— Virginia Woolf

22. “The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Confidence Quotes

23. “Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.”

— Virginia Woolf

24. “Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I’m never not thinking of you.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Health Quotes

26. “I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Desire Quotes

27. “Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.”

— Virginia Woolf

28. “My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Quotes About Brain

29. “I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky.”

— Virginia Woolf

30. “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. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”

— Virginia Woolf

31. “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Creative Quotes

32. “Language is wine upon the lips.”

— Virginia Woolf

33. “The way to write well is to live intensely.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Country Quotes

35. “Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence.”

— Virginia Woolf

36. “To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.”

— Virginia Woolf

37. “Without self awareness we are as babies in the cradles.”

— Virginia Woolf

38. “I’m terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.”

— Virginia Woolf

39. “Romantic Love is only an Illusion. A story one makes up in One’s Mind about Another Person.”

— Virginia Woolf

40. “My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Quotes About Brain

41. “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

— Virginia Woolf

42. “The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.”

— Virginia Woolf

43. “A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

45. “Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.”

— Virginia Woolf

46. “People ask me why I write. I write to find out what I know.”

— Virginia Woolf

47. “Be truthful, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting.”

— Virginia Woolf

48. “I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes, Thought Provoking Quotes

49. “The streets of London have their map, but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?”

— Virginia Woolf

50. “Fear no more, says the heart...”

— Virginia Woolf