Top 500 Virginia Woolf Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.”

— Virginia Woolf

152. “To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.”

— Virginia Woolf

153. “And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.”

— Virginia Woolf

154. “Oh, I am in love with life!”

— Virginia Woolf

155. “That great Cathedral space which was childhood.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

157. “Life without illusion is a ghostly affair.”

— Virginia Woolf

158. “Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

160. “For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.”

— Virginia Woolf

161. “For it would seem – her case proved it – that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.”

— Virginia Woolf

162. “Unless you catch ideas on the wing and nail them down, you will soon cease to have any.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

164. “Yes, I deserve a spring–I owe nobody nothing.”

— Virginia Woolf

165. “I feel all shadows of the universe multiplied deep inside my skin.”

— Virginia Woolf

166. “Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

168. “I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.”

— Virginia Woolf

169. “I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

171. “I attain a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the mind’s passage through the world, achieve in the end some kind of whole made of shivering fragments.”

— Virginia Woolf

172. “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.”

— Virginia Woolf

173. “They went in and out of each other’s minds without any effort.”

— Virginia Woolf

174. “Do not move, do not go. Sink within this moment. Hold it for ever.”

— Virginia Woolf

175. “He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.”

— Virginia Woolf

176. “The first duty of a lecturer: to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks, and keep on the mantelpiece forever.”

— Virginia Woolf

177. “And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.”

— Virginia Woolf

178. “On or about December 1910, human character changed.”

— Virginia Woolf

179. “Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.”

— Virginia Woolf

180. “Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.”

— Virginia Woolf

181. “I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.”

— Virginia Woolf

182. “Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

184. “I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.”

— Virginia Woolf

185. “And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”

— Virginia Woolf

186. “It is much more important to be oneself than anything else.”

— Virginia Woolf

187. “To be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.”

— Virginia Woolf

188. “Peace was the third emotion. Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotions made the ply of human life.”

— Virginia Woolf

189. “If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women...”

— Virginia Woolf

190. “The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?”

— Virginia Woolf

191. “Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”

— Virginia Woolf

192. “All extremes are dangerous. It is best to keep in the middle of the road, in the common ruts, however muddy.”

— Virginia Woolf

193. “We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do not always come apart is the animating tension of all art.”

— Virginia Woolf

194. “This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.”

— Virginia Woolf

195. “Life stand still here.”

— Virginia Woolf

196. “Love had a thousand shapes.”

— Virginia Woolf

197. “Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.”

— Virginia Woolf

198. “It is part of the novelist’s convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance...”

— Virginia Woolf

199. “Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.”

— Virginia Woolf

200. “Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath.”

— Virginia Woolf