39 beautiful quotes by Virginia Woolf. Click any quote to view, download and share it as an image.
← Browse all quotes
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...
“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
“Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and hav...
“When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Alm...
“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”
“He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”
“For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of think...
“Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative...
“But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interfer...
“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”
“Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.”
“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hour...
“Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.”
“The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
“Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read.”
“The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took ...
“Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring t...
“For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge...
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
“A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drink...
“And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of treesand changing leaves.”
“How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?”
“Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hoo...
“I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.”
“For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.”
“Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and hav...
“anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.”
“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
“Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
“The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.”
“For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve whic...
“For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my fle...
“Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”
“By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our...
“Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.”
“Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.”
