Top 500 Virginia Woolf Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “If the best of one’s feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?”

— Virginia Woolf

352. “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

353. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

355. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

359. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

366. “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

367. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

370. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

372. “But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality has no such simple effect upon the mind of man.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

374. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

377. “Gold runs in our blood.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

380. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

383. “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

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

387. “I have a feeling I shall go mad. I cannot go on longer in these terrible times. I shan’t recover this time. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it but cannot fight any longer.”

— Virginia Woolf

388. “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

389. “Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!”

— Virginia Woolf

390. “There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them.”

— Virginia Woolf

391. “It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.”

— Virginia Woolf

392. “They had been written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth.”

— Virginia Woolf

393. “I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.”

— Virginia Woolf

394. “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

395. “Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.”

— Virginia Woolf

396. “Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life? – startling, unexpected, unknown?”

— Virginia Woolf

397. “Never will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in anger. Still an hour remained before luncheon, and what was one to do?”

— Virginia Woolf

398. “I am volatile for one, rigid for another, angular as an icicle in silver, or voluptuous as a candle flame in gold.”

— Virginia Woolf

399. “Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all the places she had not seen;.”

— Virginia Woolf

400. “Mr. Oscar Browning was a great figure in Cambridge at one time, and used to examine the students at Girton and Newnham. Mr. Oscar Browning was wont to declare “that the impression left on his mind, after looking over any set of examination papers, was that, irrespective of the marks he might give, the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man.”

— Virginia Woolf