Top 500 Virginia Woolf Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.”

— Virginia Woolf

452. “The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands.”

— Virginia Woolf

453. “A million candles burnt in him without his being at the trouble of lighting a single one.”

— Virginia Woolf

454. “For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.”

— Virginia Woolf

455. “Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.”

— Virginia Woolf

456. “Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.”

— Virginia Woolf

457. “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.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

459. “The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly’s bloom.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

461. “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

462. “Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.”

— Virginia Woolf

463. “It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”

— Virginia Woolf

464. “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

465. “Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?”

— Virginia Woolf

466. “Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

468. “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

469. “We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

472. “Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched – love for instance – we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

475. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

478. “I use my friends rather as giglamps : There’s another field I see: by your light. Over there’s a hill. I widen my landscape.”

— Virginia Woolf

479. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

481. “Life’s bare as a bone.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

488. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

490. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

497. “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

498. “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

499. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf