Top 500 Virginia Woolf Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

209. “Yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

212. “I always have such need to merely talk to you. Even when I have nothing to talk about – with you I just seem to go right ahead and sort of invent it. I invent it for you. Because I never seem to run out of tenderness for you and because I need to feel you near. Excuse the bad writing and excuse the emotional overflow. What I mean to say, perhaps, is that, in a way, I am never empty of you; not for a moment, an instant, a single second.”

— Virginia Woolf

213. “Use words that soak up life.”

— Virginia Woolf

214. “Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades. The earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles scorch our feet. By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us.”

— Virginia Woolf

215. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

217. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

221. “Soup is cuisines kindest course.”

— Virginia Woolf

222. “Yes yes yes I do like you. I am afraid to write the stronger word.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

224. “I grow numb; I grow stiff. How shall I break up this numbness which discredits my sympathetic heart?”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

230. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

232. “I am someone who thinks and feels much more than is reasonable. And that is all.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

242. “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

243. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

250. “We must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments.”

— Virginia Woolf