Virginia Woolf quotes

“The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.”

— Virginia Woolf

“If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

“It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”

— Virginia Woolf

“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.”

— Virginia Woolf

“It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.”

— Virginia Woolf

“One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.”

— Virginia Woolf

“This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.”

— Virginia Woolf

“I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.”

— Virginia Woolf

“Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.”

— Virginia Woolf

“A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.”

— Virginia Woolf

“To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.”

— Virginia Woolf

“Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

“We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.”

— Virginia Woolf

“Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

“I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.”

— Virginia Woolf

“Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.”

— Virginia Woolf

“Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.”

— Virginia Woolf

“Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

“It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.”

— Virginia Woolf

“There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.”

— Virginia Woolf

“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

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

— Virginia Woolf

“That great Cathedral space which was childhood.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”

— Virginia Woolf