Virginia Woolf Quotes

The people we are most fond of are not good for us when we are ill.

The questions that we have to ask and to answer about that procession during this moment of transition are so important that they may well change the lives of men and women forever. For we have to ask...

Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.

What did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer.

What does the brain matter compared with the heart?

Would there be trees if we didn't see them?

Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.

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 as she sat with the...

To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away...

the battered woman--for she wore a skirt--with her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love--love which has lasted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and...

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality

I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning, I disappear, but Lond...

The first duty of a lecturer- to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever.

Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are perhaps the most discussed animal in...

He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.

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

Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

But the close withdrew: the hand softened. It was over-- the moment.

Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the center which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. The...

Everything is strange. Things are huge and very small. The stalks of flowers are thick as oak trees. Leaves are high as the domes of vast cathedrals. We are giants, lying here, who can make forests qu...