Virginia Woolf Quotes (269 Quotes)

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

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

It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities For we have too much likeness as it is, and if an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater service to humanity and we should have the immense pleasure into the bargain of watching Professor X rush for his measuring-rods to prove himself ''superior.''

Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays by Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse.

Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.

One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.

The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.

A woman must have money and a room of her own.

What is meant by ''reality'' It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable -- now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

At 46 one must be a miser only have time for essentials.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge in the bellow and uproar the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging brass bands barrel organs in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved life London this moment in June.

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

Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

For love... has two faces one white, the other black two bodies one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

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

Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.

Death is the enemy.... Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death.

Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.

A tearing wind last night. A flurry of red clouds, hard, a water colour mass of purple and black, soft as a water ice, then hard slices of intense green stone, blue stone and a ripple of crimson light.

Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn dropped face -- as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding and thought.

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.

One cannot live well, love well or sleep well unless one has dined well.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected.

Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth deforms the mind fetters the will.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.

Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends could only read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all -- save ''a man with a red moustache,'' ''a young man in gray smoking a pipe.''

Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is very opposite of what it is above.

Last Words in a Suicide note I feel certain that I'm going mad again. I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices.

Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

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?

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

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

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.