The Best Virginia Woolf quotes

Thoughts are divine. — Virginia Woolf

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in. — Virginia Woolf

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. — Virginia Woolf

What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was. — Virginia Woolf

There are moments when one can neither think nor feel, she thought, and if one can neithre feel nor think, where’s one? — Virginia Woolf

Let us not take for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small. — Virginia Woolf

Thoughts without words… Can that be? — Virginia Woolf

She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness. — Virginia Woolf

Roses,’ she thought sardonically, ‘All trash, m’dear. — Virginia Woolf

The word–coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping. — Virginia Woolf

She looked pale, mysterious, like a lily, drowned under water, he thought. — Virginia Woolf

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

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory. — Virginia Woolf

About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone. — Virginia Woolf

They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought. — Virginia Woolf

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… — Virginia Woolf

The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; My thoughts follow the exact same process. — Virginia Woolf

He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink. — Virginia Woolf

Life stand still here. — Virginia Woolf

How remorseless life is! — Virginia Woolf

There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death. — Virginia Woolf

It’s been a perpetual discovery, my life. A miracle. — Virginia Woolf

What she loved: life, London, this moment of June. — Virginia Woolf

He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life. — Virginia Woolf

Life without illusion is a ghostly affair. — Virginia Woolf

You cannot find peace by avoiding life. — Virginia Woolf

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life. — Virginia Woolf

I am not going to lie down and weep away a life of care. — Virginia Woolf

And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one. — Virginia Woolf

Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit. — Virginia Woolf

It’s my choice, to choose how to live my life. — Virginia Woolf

Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life. — Virginia Woolf

Life would split apart without letters. — Virginia Woolf

And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life. — Virginia Woolf

You can not gain peace by avoiding life. — Virginia Woolf

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

One must love everything. — Virginia Woolf

But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love. — Virginia Woolf

Love, the poet said, is woman’s whole existence. — Virginia Woolf

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. — Virginia Woolf

Clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude. — Virginia Woolf

One does not love a place the less because one has suffered in it. — Virginia Woolf

But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people. — Virginia Woolf

Oh, I am in love with life! — Virginia Woolf

A good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. — Virginia Woolf

Leonard, always the years between us, always the years. Always the love. Always the hours. — Virginia Woolf

Conversation, fastidious goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will. — Virginia Woolf

I love tremendous and sonorous words. — Virginia Woolf

Love had a thousand shapes. — Virginia Woolf

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… — Virginia Woolf

Peace was the third emotion. Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotions made the ply of human life. — Virginia Woolf

To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality. — Virginia Woolf

As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better. — Virginia Woolf

I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person. — Virginia Woolf

Lord, how tired one gets of one’s own writing. — Virginia Woolf

I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot. — Virginia Woolf

I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else. — Virginia Woolf

Writing is still like heaving bricks over a wall. — Virginia Woolf

As nobody can possibly tell me whether one’s writing is bad or good, the only certain value is one’s own pleasure. I am sure of that. — Virginia Woolf

There was a day when I liked writing letters––it has gone. Unfortunately the passion for getting them remains. — Virginia Woolf

I mean it’s the writing, not the being read, that excites me. — Virginia Woolf

I am I: and I must follow that furrow, not copy another. That is the only justification for my writing, living. — Virginia Woolf

The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea. — 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

Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? — Virginia Woolf

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

A woman’s writing is always feminine; it cannot help being feminine; at its best it is most feminine; the only difficulty lies in defining what we mean by feminine. — Virginia Woolf

You have a touch in letter writing that is beyond me. Something unexpected, like coming round a corner in a rose garden and finding it still daylight. — Virginia Woolf

Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money. — Virginia Woolf

Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure. — Virginia Woolf

I like the unreality of your mind; the whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd. — Virginia Woolf

They went in and out of each other’s minds without any effort. — Virginia Woolf

It was the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind indelibly. — Virginia Woolf

The mind is the most capricious of insects–flitting, fluttering. — Virginia Woolf

The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.’ That will be useful. — 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

There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind. — Virginia Woolf

What I value is the naked contact of a mind. — Virginia Woolf

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind. — Virginia Woolf

She has no body as others have. People have no meaning to her. She has no answer for them. Her mind steps into emptiness, alone. — Virginia Woolf

There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice. — Virginia Woolf

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall. — Virginia Woolf

My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way. — Virginia Woolf

Night had come–night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day. — Virginia Woolf

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. — Virginia Woolf

The mind which is most capable of receiving impressions is very often the least capable of drawing conclusions. — Virginia Woolf

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe. — Virginia Woolf

At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials. — Virginia Woolf

I am not so gifted as at one time seemed likely. — Virginia Woolf

If this were the time or the place to uphold a paradox, I am half inclined to state that Norfolk is one of the most beautiful of counties. — Virginia Woolf

The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published. — Virginia Woolf

She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged — Virginia Woolf

At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever — Virginia Woolf

I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you. — 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

A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing. — 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

I feel certain that I’m going mad again, I feel we can’t go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices — Virginia Woolf

All the time she writing the world had continued. — Virginia Woolf

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. — Virginia Woolf

The world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued. — Virginia Woolf

Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections. — Virginia Woolf

Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame — Virginia Woolf

He–for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it–was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. — Virginia Woolf

I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time. — Virginia Woolf

The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging. — Virginia Woolf

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art. — Virginia Woolf

We scarcely want to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human. — Virginia Woolf

The value of education is among the greatest of all human values… — Virginia Woolf

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame. — Virginia Woolf

I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony. — 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

Disastrous would have been the result if a fire or a death had suddenly demanded something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the hungry hours. — Virginia Woolf

Illness is a part of every human being’s experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self–consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals. — Virginia Woolf

What is a woman? I assure you, I do not know … I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill. — Virginia Woolf

The profound difference that divides the human race is a question of bait–whether to fish with worms or not. — Virginia Woolf

My notion’s to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves. — Virginia Woolf

It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals. — Virginia Woolf