Top 500 Virginia Woolf Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

355. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

357. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

361. “If the best of one’s feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

363. “If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? – not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?”

— Virginia Woolf

364. “I like your energy. I love your legs. I long to see you.”

— Virginia Woolf

365. “Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

— Virginia Woolf

366. “I think sometimes I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn.”

— Virginia Woolf

367. “You have a touch in letter writing that is beyond me. Something unexpected, like coming round a corner in a rose garden and finding it still daylight.”

— Virginia Woolf

368. “In her eyes shone the sweetness of melancholy.”

— Virginia Woolf

369. “How are we to account for the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid which is so much involved in our love of ghost stories?”

— Virginia Woolf

370. “There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.”

— Virginia Woolf

371. “I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it’s ripe; it will be exquisite by September.”

— Virginia Woolf

372. “Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.”

— Virginia Woolf

373. “I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.”

— Virginia Woolf

374. “But what after all, is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the waves. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness.”

— Virginia Woolf

375. “That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library.”

— Virginia Woolf

376. “It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life.”

— Virginia Woolf

377. “Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?”

— Virginia Woolf

378. “It is from the middle class that writers spring, because, it is in the middle class only that the practice of writing is as natural and habitual as hoeing a field or building a house.”

— Virginia Woolf

379. “For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been.”

— Virginia Woolf

380. “Gold runs in our blood.”

— Virginia Woolf

381. “Conversation, fastidious goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will.”

— Virginia Woolf

382. “Whenever you see a board up with “Trespassers will be prosecuted,” trespass at once.”

— Virginia Woolf

383. “So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then.”

— Virginia Woolf

384. “Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.”

— Virginia Woolf

385. “Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

387. “Or is anger, I wondered, somehow, the familiar, the attendant sprite of power?”

— Virginia Woolf

388. “I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer?”

— Virginia Woolf

389. “I’m fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It’s an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.”

— Virginia Woolf

390. “She did in her own heart infinitely prefer boobies to clever men who wrote dissertations.”

— Virginia Woolf

391. “The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.’ That will be useful.”

— Virginia Woolf

392. “If it were now to die, ’twere now to be most happy.”

— Virginia Woolf

393. “Does Nature supplement what man advanced? Or does she complete what he began?”

— Virginia Woolf

394. “What a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a beach.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

396. “One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats – and one always secretes too much jelly.”

— Virginia Woolf

397. “The sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour struck out between them with extraordinary vigour, as if a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and that.”

— Virginia Woolf

398. “The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.”

— Virginia Woolf

399. “They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought, and no doubt if you are of a mystical tendency, consolation, and even explanation, shower down from the unbroken surface. But.”

— Virginia Woolf

400. “Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty – it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life – froze it.”

— Virginia Woolf