Top 500 Virginia Woolf Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

254. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

256. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

258. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

263. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

265. “To love makes one solitary.”

— Virginia Woolf

266. “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

267. “I have had my vision.”

— Virginia Woolf

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

274. “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

275. “Tragedies come in the hungry hours.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

277. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

279. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

282. “For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

284. “I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.”

— Virginia Woolf

285. “A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.”

— Virginia Woolf

286. “Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?”

— Virginia Woolf

287. “Facts are all that they can offer us, and facts are a very inferior form of fiction.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

289. “But nevertheless, the fact remained, it was almost impossible to dislike anyone if one looked at them.”

— Virginia Woolf

290. “As a woman, I have no country.”

— Virginia Woolf

291. “I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again – as I always am when I write.”

— Virginia Woolf

292. “Our friends – how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often not. Life is a dream surely.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

294. “Would there be trees if we didn’t see them?”

— Virginia Woolf

295. “It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England from the train window as they left Newhaven, it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”

— Virginia Woolf

296. “Nothing is stronger than the position of the dead among the living.”

— Virginia Woolf

297. “I see through most people; I’m hardly ever wrong. I see at once what they’ve got in them.”

— Virginia Woolf

298. “I got out this diary and read, as one always reads one’s own writing; with a kind of guilty intensity.”

— Virginia Woolf

299. “This morning I am wonderfully peaceful. Just like a storm that has spent itself.”

— Virginia Woolf

300. “You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures.”

— Virginia Woolf