Top 500 Virginia Woolf Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

154. “Oh, I am in love with life!”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

156. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

160. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

165. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

169. “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

170. “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

172. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

184. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

188. “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

189. “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

190. “Life stand still here.”

— Virginia Woolf

191. “Love had a thousand shapes.”

— Virginia Woolf

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.”

— Virginia Woolf

196. “You would get longer livelier and more frequent letters from me, if it weren’t for the Christian religion. How that bell tolling at the end of the garden, dum dum, dum dum, annoys me! Why is Christianity so insistent and so sad?”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

198. “What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.”

— Virginia Woolf

199. “She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.”

— Virginia Woolf

200. “It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.”

— Virginia Woolf