Adeline Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and also a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
We have compiled some of the greatest inspirational quotes of Virginia Woolf.
Virginia Woolf Inspirational Quotes
“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.”
– Virginia Woolf
“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
– Virginia Woolf
“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
– Virginia Woolf
“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.”
– Virginia Woolf
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
– Virginia Woolf
“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.”
– Virginia Woolf
“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.”
– Virginia Woolf
“For it would seem—her case proved it—that we write, not with the fingers but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fiber of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.”
– Virginia Woolf
“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”
– Virginia Woolf
“For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.”
– Virginia Woolf
“I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.”
– Virginia Woolf
“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
– Virginia Woolf
“When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.”
– Virginia Woolf
“Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.” – Virginia Woolf
“Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”
– Virginia Woolf
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
– Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf Greatest Quotes
“Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”
– Virginia Woolf
“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
– Virginia Woolf
“Love, the poet said, is woman’s whole existence.”
– Virginia Woolf
“I have lost friends, some by death… others by sheer inability to cross the street.”
– Virginia Woolf
“To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is… at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away…”
– Virginia Woolf
“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?”
– Virginia Woolf
“I worship you but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer?”
– Virginia Woolf
“I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything.”
– Virginia Woolf
“They went in and out of each other’s minds without any effort.”
– Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf Inspirational Quotes
“To love makes one solitary.”
– Virginia Woolf
“Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.”
– Virginia Woolf
“Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I’m never not thinking of you.”
– Virginia Woolf
“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”
– Virginia Woolf
“Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
– Virginia Woolf
“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.”
– Virginia Woolf
“As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”
– Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf Motivational Quotes
“A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgement, 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
“The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.”
– Virginia Woolf
“I really don’t advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married.”
– 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
“For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others… and this self, having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.”
– Virginia Woolf
“Anything can happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.”
– Virginia Woolf
“I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”
– Virginia Woolf
“There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, ‘consume me.’”
– Virginia Woolf
“Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy.”
– Virginia Woolf
“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
– Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf Life Changing Quotes
“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes 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
“I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky.”
– Virginia Woolf
“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?”
– Virginia Woolf
“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
– Virginia Woolf
“I am rooted but I flow.”
– Virginia Woolf
“It may be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”
– Virginia Woolf
“Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”
– Virginia Woolf
“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
“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought hot it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”
– Virginia Woolf
“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
“I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.”
– Virginia Woolf
“Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.”
– Virginia Woolf
“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”
– Virginia Woolf
“And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.”
– Virginia Woolf