Virginia Woolf quotes

Virginia Woolf was a British writer and leading figure of modernist literature. Her innovative narrative techniques and exploration of consciousness helped redefine the novel. She remains celebrated for her influential works and profound impact on literary history. Here are 500 of her quotes:

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. (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

One cannot live well, love well or sleep well unless one has dined well.

Virginia Woolf

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Virginia Woolf

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

Virginia Woolf

Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

Virginia Woolf

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.

Virginia Woolf

The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

Virginia Woolf

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.

Virginia Woolf

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Virginia Woolf

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. (Virginia Woolf)

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

Virginia Woolf

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

Virginia Woolf

Humor is the first gift to perish in a foreign language.

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 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

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.

Virginia Woolf

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

Virginia Woolf

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

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

As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

Virginia Woolf

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

Virginia Woolf

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

Virginia Woolf

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

Virginia Woolf

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Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf - Image

Occupation: English Author
Born: January 25, 1882
Died: March 28, 1941
Quotes count: 500
Wikipedia: Virginia Woolf

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