Virginia Woolf Quotes

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...

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

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.

For nothing [...] is more heavenly than to resist and to yield; to yield and to resist.

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

And the supreme mystery was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous...

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of...

I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.

If you drink the good wine of the noble countess, you have to entertain her less desirable friends.

Yes, I deserve a spring–I owe nobody nothing.

I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in 's of the poet. She died young--alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now...

Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself ba...

Roses, she thought sardonically, All trash, m’dear.

A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her...

Pretty Stones

So that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again...

I want to write a novel about Silence, he said; the things people don’t say.

How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark t...

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes