Virginia Woolf was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly. – Virginia Woolf
It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality. – Virginia Woolf
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. – 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
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. – Virginia Woolf
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
Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory. – Virginia Woolf
For most of history, Anonymous was a woman. – Virginia Woolf
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. – 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
These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism. – Virginia Woolf
The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind. – 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
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
The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers. – 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
This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant. – Virginia Woolf
That great Cathedral space which was childhood. – 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
Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded. – Virginia Woolf
Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life. – 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
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. – Virginia Woolf
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order. – Virginia Woolf
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame. – Virginia Woolf
The older one grows, the more one likes indecency. – Virginia Woolf
I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it. – Virginia Woolf
To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father. – Virginia Woolf
Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art. – Virginia Woolf
Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women? – Virginia Woolf
Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue. – Virginia Woolf
Language is wine upon the lips. – Virginia Woolf
Arrange whatever pieces come your way. – 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
If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully? – Virginia Woolf
Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic. – Virginia Woolf
It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. – Virginia Woolf
As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world. – Virginia Woolf
You cannot find peace by avoiding life. – Virginia Woolf
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. – Virginia Woolf
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points. – Virginia Woolf
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. – 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
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. – 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
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