Top 500 Virginia Woolf Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “I should like to tidy things up and disappear.”

— Virginia Woolf

452. “Alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

454. “The most monstrous monster is the monster with noble feelings.”

— Virginia Woolf

455. “Never pretend that the things you haven’t got are not worth having.”

— Virginia Woolf

456. “It was the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind indelibly.”

— Virginia Woolf

457. “Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass. 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

458. “To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.”

— Virginia Woolf

459. “And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover.”

— Virginia Woolf

460. “She was like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness.”

— Virginia Woolf

461. “The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman.”

— Virginia Woolf

462. “My spine is soft like wax near the flame of the candle. I dream; I dream.”

— Virginia Woolf

463. “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

— Virginia Woolf

464. “Only longing can fill with more of itself.”

— Virginia Woolf

465. “I would never re-write you. You are by far my most complete and greatest novel.”

— Virginia Woolf

466. “Richard has improved. You are right,” said Sally. “I shall go and talk to him. I shall say goodnight. What does the brain matter,” said Lady Rosseter, getting up, “compared with the heart?” “I will come,” said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.”

— Virginia Woolf

467. “History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.”

— Virginia Woolf

468. “There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room.”

— Virginia Woolf

469. “Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life?”

— Virginia Woolf

470. “One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.”

— Virginia Woolf

471. “I really don’t advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married.”

— Virginia Woolf

472. “Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading – I like reading books in the bulk.”

— Virginia Woolf

473. “I want to raise up the magic world all round me and live strongly and quietly there.”

— Virginia Woolf

474. “The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.”

— Virginia Woolf

475. “Life’s bare as a bone.”

— Virginia Woolf

476. “There are no teachers, saints, prophets, good people, but the artists.”

— Virginia Woolf

477. “There was a serenity about him always that had the look of innocence, when, technically, the word was no longer applicable.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

479. “Did nature supplement what man advanced? Did she complete what he began? With equal complacence she saw his misery, condoned his meanness and acquiesced in his torture.”

— Virginia Woolf

480. “If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?”

— Virginia Woolf

481. “Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty, so that all one’s perceptions, half way to truth, were tangled in a golden mesh?”

— Virginia Woolf

482. “He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”

— Virginia Woolf

483. “They start the day confident, braced, believing themselves desired at Miss Smith’s tea party; they say to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they speak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have had such profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious notes in the margin of the private mind.”

— Virginia Woolf

484. “I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction.”

— Virginia Woolf

485. “A wet day. And I am glad of the rain, because I have talked too much.”

— Virginia Woolf

486. “This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.”

— Virginia Woolf

487. “This I say is the present moment; this is the first day of the summer holidays. This is part of the emerging monster to whom we are attached.”

— Virginia Woolf

488. “Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.”

— Virginia Woolf

489. “I want someone to sit beside after the day’s pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy – to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits.”

— Virginia Woolf

490. “I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don’t budge though armies cross them.”

— Virginia Woolf

491. “But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.”

— Virginia Woolf

492. “I am drowning, my dear, in seas of fire.”

— Virginia Woolf

493. “I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases.”

— Virginia Woolf

494. “To sit and contemplate – to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where and what you are.”

— Virginia Woolf

495. “She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell and she had felt that was true of life – one scratched on the wall.”

— Virginia Woolf

496. “One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.”

— Virginia Woolf

497. “And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is a woman’s whole existence...”

— Virginia Woolf

498. “The weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully. The ape is too distant to be sedulous. Perhaps.”

— Virginia Woolf

499. “He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.”

— Virginia Woolf

500. “Am I alone in my egotism when I say that never does the pale light of dawn filter through the blinds of 52 Tavistock Square but I open my eyes and exclaim, “Good God! Here I am again!” not always with pleasure, often with pain; sometimes in a spasm.”

— Virginia Woolf