Top 500 Virginia Woolf Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Meanwhile, let us abolish the ticking of time’s clock with one blow. Come closer.”

— Virginia Woolf

202. “No, I’m not clever. I’ve always cared more for people than for ideas.”

— Virginia Woolf

203. “Children never forget injustice. They forgive heaps of things grown-up people mind; but that sin is the unpardonable sin.”

— Virginia Woolf

204. “I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person.”

— Virginia Woolf

205. “There was a day when I liked writing letters – it has gone. Unfortunately the passion for getting them remains.”

— Virginia Woolf

206. “Use words that soak up life.”

— Virginia Woolf

207. “There is no mark on the wall to measure the precise height of women. There are no yard measures neatly divided into the fractions of an inch that one can lay against the qualities of a good mother or the devotion of a daughter or fidelity of a sister or the capacity of a housekeeper.”

— Virginia Woolf

208. “I belong to quick, futile moments of intense feeling. Yes, I belong to moments. Not to people.”

— Virginia Woolf

209. “Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.”

— Virginia Woolf

210. “I want to write a novel about silence. The things people don’t say.”

— Virginia Woolf

211. “How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?”

— Virginia Woolf

212. “Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time.”

— Virginia Woolf

213. “Soup is cuisines kindest course.”

— Virginia Woolf

214. “I am never stagnant; I rise from my worst disasters, I turn, I change.”

— Virginia Woolf

215. “Her life-that was the only chance she had-the short season between two silences.”

— Virginia Woolf

216. “He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.”

— Virginia Woolf

217. “Once she knows how to read there’s only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

219. “For we think back through our mothers if we are women.”

— Virginia Woolf

220. “How lovely goodness is in those who, stepping lightly, go smiling through the world.”

— Virginia Woolf

221. “Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.”

— Virginia Woolf

222. “Well, we must wait for the future to show.”

— Virginia Woolf

223. “Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.”

— Virginia Woolf

224. “Nothing, I know, had any chance against death.”

— Virginia Woolf

225. “Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will.”

— Virginia Woolf

226. “The chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of-man.”

— Virginia Woolf

227. “It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole. This wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together.”

— Virginia Woolf

228. “There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.”

— Virginia Woolf

229. “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

230. “At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial-and any question about sex is that-one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.”

— Virginia Woolf

231. “Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.”

— Virginia Woolf

232. “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

233. “I am not one and simple, but complex and many.”

— Virginia Woolf

234. “Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing.”

— Virginia Woolf

235. “You can’t think how I depend on you, and when you’re not there the colour goes out of my life.”

— Virginia Woolf

236. “Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.”

— Virginia Woolf

237. “I am extremely happy walking on the downs... I like to have space to spread my mind out in.”

— Virginia Woolf

238. “But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality has no such simple effect upon the mind of man.”

— Virginia Woolf

239. “The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”

— Virginia Woolf

240. “But words have been used too often; touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street. The words we seek hang close to the tree. We come at dawn and find them sweet beneath the leaf.”

— Virginia Woolf

241. “She was like a crinkled poppy; with the desire to drink dry dust.”

— Virginia Woolf

242. “Why must they grow up and lose it all?”

— Virginia Woolf

243. “One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.”

— Virginia Woolf

244. “Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves.”

— Virginia Woolf

245. “About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.”

— Virginia Woolf

246. “When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness – I am nothing.”

— Virginia Woolf

247. “So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball.”

— Virginia Woolf

248. “I’m not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and arrows of sadness.”

— Virginia Woolf

249. “The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.”

— Virginia Woolf

250. “One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.”

— Virginia Woolf