Top 500 Virginia Woolf Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality.”

— Virginia Woolf

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

324. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

326. “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

327. “That complete statement which is literature.”

— Virginia Woolf

328. “Knitting is the saving of life.”

— Virginia Woolf

329. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

335. “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

336. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

340. “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

341. “It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.”

— Virginia Woolf

342. “Let us not take for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.”

— Virginia Woolf

343. “Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

346. “You wish to be a poet; you wish to be a lover. But the splendid clarity of your intelligence, and the remorseless honestly of your intellect bring you to a halt.”

— Virginia Woolf

347. “I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.”

— Virginia Woolf

348. “Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy.”

— Virginia Woolf

349. “O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare’s sonnets!”

— Virginia Woolf

350. “Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure.”

— Virginia Woolf