Top 500 Virginia Woolf Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “June was white. I see the fields white with daisies, and white with dresses; and tennis courts marked with white. Then there was wind and violent thunder. There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, “Consume me”. That was at midsummer.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

304. “We are giants, lying here, who can make forests quiver.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

306. “Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.”

— Virginia Woolf

307. “I want to dance, laugh, eat pink cakes, yellow cakes, drink thin, sharp wine. Or an indecent story, now – I could relish that. The older one grows the more one likes indecency.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

309. “La bellezza del mondo ha due tagli, uno di gioia, l’altro d’angoscia, e taglia in due il cuore.”

— Virginia Woolf

310. “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

311. “In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality.”

— Virginia Woolf

312. “The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme – thinking too much.”

— Virginia Woolf

313. “They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.”

— Virginia Woolf

314. “The mind which is most capable of receiving impressions is very often the least capable of drawing conclusions.”

— Virginia Woolf

315. “But love... it’s only an illusion. A story one makes up in one’s mind about another person. And one knows all the time it isn’t true. Of course one knows; why one’s always taking care not to destroy the illusion.”

— Virginia Woolf

316. “To some few friends, and to thy sorrows sing, For groves of laurel thou wert nevermeant; Be dark enough thy shades, and be thou there content.”

— Virginia Woolf

317. “Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”

— Virginia Woolf

318. “When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook – a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.”

— Virginia Woolf

319. “Criticism? An artist wants praise. Praise.”

— Virginia Woolf

320. “Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.”

— Virginia Woolf

321. “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

322. “She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged.”

— Virginia Woolf

323. “I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else.”

— Virginia Woolf

324. “O why do I ever let anyone read what I write! Every time I have to go through a breakfast with a letter of criticism I swear I will write for my own praise or blame in future. It is a misery.”

— Virginia Woolf

325. “A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.”

— Virginia Woolf

326. “I sleep among ravishing illusions and wake to their burden.”

— Virginia Woolf

327. “I was lying in bed this morning and saying to myself, ‘the remarkable thing about Ethel is her stupendous self-satisfaction’ when in came your letter to confirm this profound psychological observation. How delighted I was!”

— Virginia Woolf

328. “Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I’ve read and what I haven’t read.”

— Virginia Woolf

329. “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

330. “I find that when I’ve seen a certain number of people my mind becomes like an old match box – the part one strikes on, I mean.”

— Virginia Woolf

331. “Knitting is the saving of life.”

— Virginia Woolf

332. “We scarcely want to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.”

— Virginia Woolf

333. “Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.”

— Virginia Woolf

334. “That complete statement which is literature.”

— Virginia Woolf

335. “Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river.”

— Virginia Woolf

336. “As for my next book, I won’t write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.”

— Virginia Woolf

337. “The world is crammed with delightful things.”

— Virginia Woolf

338. “But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying.”

— Virginia Woolf

339. “How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half-sheets of note-paper. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.”

— Virginia Woolf

340. “Talvolta penso che il paradiso sia leggere continuamente, senza fine.”

— Virginia Woolf

341. “To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand, is not easy.”

— Virginia Woolf

342. “Orlando had become a woman. In every other aspect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been.”

— Virginia Woolf

343. “This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it.”

— Virginia Woolf

344. “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes.”

— Virginia Woolf

345. “But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects; and sounds very remote and then very close; flesh being gashed and blood spurting, a joint suddenly twisted – beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.”

— Virginia Woolf

346. “It is only when we look at the past and take from it the element of uncertainty that we can enjoy perfect peace.”

— Virginia Woolf

347. “Woolf was breaking new ground in the way she rendered consciousness and her understanding of human subjectivity.”

— Virginia Woolf

348. “In other words, now that she had rid herself of falsehood, that young woman had only to be herself. Ah, but what is “herself”? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.”

— Virginia Woolf

349. “She felt somehow very like him – the young man who had killed himself.”

— Virginia Woolf

350. “Until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself.”

— Virginia Woolf