69 Virginia Woolf Quotes about Life, Feminism, Love, Freedom and Literature
Adeline Virginia Woolf (born 25 January 1882, Kensington, London, United Kingdom – died 28 March 1941, Lewes, United Kingdom) 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. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction".
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.Nothing has really happened until it has been described.Books are the mirrors of the soul.I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.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.Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.I am not one and simple, but complex and many.Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.You cannot find peace by avoiding life.When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.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.As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.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?
How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.
Virginia Woolf
Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.I am rooted, but I flow.Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.They can because they think they can.There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.
What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.
Virginia Woolf
Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.Never pretend that the things you haven’t got are not worth having.Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.
A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.
Virginia Woolf
Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, 'Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading'.
Virginia Woolf
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.I will not be ‘famous’, ‘great’. I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.What does the brain matter compared with the heart?As long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.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.It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes.
Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.
Virginia Woolf
Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street.To love makes one solitary.I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.What matters is precisely this; the unspoken at the edge of the spoken.Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.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.I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.
