Top 500 Virginia Woolf Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”

— Virginia Woolf

252. “She seemed a compound of the autumn leaves and the winter sunshine...”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

254. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

259. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

261. “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

262. “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

263. “Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words.”

— Virginia Woolf

264. “For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Book Quotes

265. “For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.”

— Virginia Woolf

266. “To survive, each sentence must have, at its heart, a little spark of fire, and this, whatever the risk, the novelist must pluck with his own hands from the blaze.”

— Virginia Woolf

267. “So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.”

— Virginia Woolf

268. “The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it.”

— Virginia Woolf

269. “A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.”

— Virginia Woolf

270. “I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Reading Quotes

271. “Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Book Quotes

272. “I” is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being.”

— Virginia Woolf

273. “The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.”

— Virginia Woolf

274. “One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy.”

— Virginia Woolf

275. “No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.”

— Virginia Woolf

276. “Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.”

— Virginia Woolf

277. “The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.”

— Virginia Woolf

278. “Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement.”

— Virginia Woolf

279. “She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.”

— Virginia Woolf

280. “It was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy.”

— Virginia Woolf

281. “So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life, and whether this is living.”

— Virginia Woolf

282. “They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Book Quotes

283. “To love makes one solitary.”

— Virginia Woolf

284. “At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Real Quotes, Book Quotes

285. “Big Ben was beginning to strike, first the warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.”

— Virginia Woolf

286. “It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.”

— Virginia Woolf

287. “I have had my vision.”

— Virginia Woolf

288. “Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Book Quotes

289. “Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.”

— Virginia Woolf

290. “Tragedies come in the hungry hours.”

— Virginia Woolf

291. “The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it.”

— Virginia Woolf

292. “Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!”

— Virginia Woolf

293. “Speech is an old torn net, through which the fish escape as one casts it over them.”

— Virginia Woolf

294. “Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.”

— Virginia Woolf

295. “For there is a virtue in truth; it has an almost mystic power. Like radium, it seems to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms of light.”

— Virginia Woolf

296. “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

— Virginia Woolf

297. “We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie asleep.”

— Virginia Woolf

298. “Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned – in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Book Quotes

299. “He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”

— Virginia Woolf

300. “When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.”

— Virginia Woolf