I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again – as I always am when I write.
Virginia Woolf
It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.
Virginia Woolf
It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.
Virginia Woolf
Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
Virginia Woolf
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
Virginia Woolf
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
Virginia Woolf
One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats – and one always secretes too much jelly.
Virginia Woolf
One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
Virginia Woolf
Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.
Virginia Woolf
That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
Virginia Woolf
The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.
Virginia Woolf
There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a
gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.
Virginia Woolf
Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.
Virginia Woolf
To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.
Virginia Woolf
We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new
methods.
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
Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the
attachment is scarcely perceptible.
Virginia Woolf
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Virginia Woolf
If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? – not how
she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?
Virginia Woolf
Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background.
Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.
Virginia Woolf
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
Virginia Woolf
Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of
the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
Virginia Woolf
The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.
Virginia Woolf
To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
Virginia Woolf
Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?
Virginia Woolf
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Virginia Woolf
Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the
creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
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
Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.
Virginia Woolf
If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or ‘our’ country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are
fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.
Virginia Woolf
Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Virginia Woolf
It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous,
or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.
Virginia Woolf
It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
Virginia Woolf
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.
Virginia Woolf
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
Virginia Woolf
A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in
not out.
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
The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.
Virginia Woolf
The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
Virginia Woolf
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
Virginia Woolf
There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or
breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.
Virginia Woolf
This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the
feelings of women in a drawing-room.
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
When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
Virginia Woolf
You send a boy to school in order to make friends – the right sort.
Virginia Woolf
