Top 500 Virginia Woolf Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.”

— Virginia Woolf

102. “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.”

— Virginia Woolf

103. “Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.”

— Virginia Woolf

104. “I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore.”

— Virginia Woolf

105. “I will go down with my colors flying.”

— Virginia Woolf

106. “What a lark! What a plunge!”

— Virginia Woolf

107. “Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?”

— Virginia Woolf

108. “Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.”

— Virginia Woolf

109. “Lord, how tired one gets of one’s own writing.”

— Virginia Woolf

110. “The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”

— Virginia Woolf

111. “I am rooted, but I flow. All gold, flowing that way.”

— Virginia Woolf

112. “It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.”

— Virginia Woolf

113. “If you are losing your leisure, look out! – It may be you are losing your soul.”

— Virginia Woolf

114. “Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.”

— Virginia Woolf

115. “Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.”

— Virginia Woolf

116. “They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought.”

— Virginia Woolf

117. “For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of – to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone.”

— Virginia Woolf

118. “But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.”

— Virginia Woolf

119. “Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.”

— Virginia Woolf

120. “How remorseless life is!”

— Virginia Woolf

121. “Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.”

— Virginia Woolf

122. “In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.”

— Virginia Woolf

123. “Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river.”

— Virginia Woolf

124. “The immense success of our life is, I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it.”

— Virginia Woolf

125. “The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.”

— Virginia Woolf

126. “War is not women’s history.”

— Virginia Woolf

127. “Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are.”

— Virginia Woolf

128. “Melancholy were the sounds on a winter’s night.”

— Virginia Woolf

129. “And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.”

— Virginia Woolf

130. “The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.”

— Virginia Woolf

131. “I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it.”

— Virginia Woolf

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132. “Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.”

— Virginia Woolf

133. “The depths of the sea are only water after all.”

— Virginia Woolf

134. “I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you.”

— Virginia Woolf

135. “Like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life.”

— Virginia Woolf

136. “Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.”

— Virginia Woolf

137. “But I don’t think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age.”

— Virginia Woolf

138. “My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.”

— Virginia Woolf

139. “Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.”

— Virginia Woolf

140. “The mind is the most capricious of insects – flitting, fluttering.”

— Virginia Woolf

141. “Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.”

— Virginia Woolf

142. “We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.”

— Virginia Woolf

143. “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall.”

— Virginia Woolf

144. “Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.”

— Virginia Woolf

145. “For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

147. “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.”

— Virginia Woolf

148. “It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.”

— Virginia Woolf

149. “There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.”

— Virginia Woolf

150. “Meanwhile, let us abolish the ticking of time’s clock with one blow. Come closer.”

— Virginia Woolf