Virginia Woolf quotes

“To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.”

— Virginia Woolf

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

— Virginia Woolf

“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.”

— Virginia Woolf

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

“The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

“A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.”

— Virginia Woolf

“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.”

— Virginia Woolf

“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.”

— Virginia Woolf

“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

“This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

“Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.”

— Virginia Woolf

“For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

“Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

— Virginia Woolf

“It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.”

— Virginia Woolf

“It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”

— Virginia Woolf

“Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.”

— Virginia Woolf

“Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?”

— Virginia Woolf

“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.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

“When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.”

— Virginia Woolf

“You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort.”

— Virginia Woolf