Virginia Woolf Quotes

The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.

Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?

About Author

Adeline Virginia Woolf née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer and one of the most influential 20th-century modernist authors. She helped to pioneer the use of stream of consciousness narration as a literary device.
Virginia Woolf was born in South Kensington, London, into an affluent and intellectual family as the seventh child of Julia Prinsep Jackson and Leslie Stephen. She grew up in a blended household of eight children, including her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. Educated at home in English classics and Victorian literature, Woolf later attended King’s College London, where she studied classics and history and encountered early advocates for women’s rights and education.
After the death of her father in 1904, Woolf and her family moved to the bohemian Bloomsbury district, where she became a founding member of the influential Bloomsbury Group. She married Leonard Woolf in 1912, and together they established the Hogarth Press in 1917, which published much of her work. They eventually settled in Sussex in 1940, maintaining their involvement in literary circles throughout their lives.

Woolf began publishing professionally in 1900 and rose to prominence during the interwar period with novels like Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), as well as the feminist essay A Room of One’s Own (1929). Her work became central to 1970s feminist criticism and remains influential worldwide, having been translated into over 50 languages. Woolf’s legacy endures through extensive scholarship, cultural portrayals, and tributes such as memorials, societies, and university buildings bearing her name.

Let us not take it for granted that life exists more in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

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.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

Alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know

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

Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that...

For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since...

She would not say of any one in the world that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was out...

The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes...

I want someone to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy - to be alone w...

Meanwhile, let us abolish the ticking of time’s clock with one blow. Come closer.

Chastity ... has, even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of...

The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.

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

Yet she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreathes heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this; while the wo...

Does it explain my astonishment the other day when Z, most humane, most modest of men, taking up some book by Rebecca West and reading a passage in it, exclaimed, 'The arrant feminist! She says that m...

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.

I exist only in the soles of my feet and in the tired muscles of my thighs. We have been walking for hours it seems. But where? I cannot remember.