Insightful Quotes from Books by Virginia Woolf

This time, I invite you to enjoy a set of quotes from books by Virginia Woolf, a renowned British writer and one of the influential modernist authors of the 20th century. She was a writer who pioneered the use of stream-of-consciousness narration as a literary device. Let’s get inspired by some of the wisdom and…

Insightful Quotes from Books by Virginia Woolf

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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)

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Books are the mirrors of the soul.

(Virginia Woolf)

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I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.

(Virginia Woolf)

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One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

(Virginia Woolf)

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

(Virginia Woolf)

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

(Virginia Woolf)

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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)

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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)

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

(Virginia Woolf)

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No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

(Virginia Woolf)

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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)

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No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.

(Virginia Woolf)

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I am rooted, but I flow.

(Virginia Woolf)

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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)

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

(Virginia Woolf)

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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)

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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)

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And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.

(Virginia Woolf)

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Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

(Virginia Woolf)

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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)

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I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.

(Virginia Woolf)

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Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.

(Virginia Woolf)

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It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface.

(Virginia Woolf)

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Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks—all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.

(Virginia Woolf)

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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)

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So 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)

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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)

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Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

(Virginia Woolf)

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She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.

(Virginia Woolf)

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Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?

(Virginia Woolf)

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And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.

(Virginia Woolf)

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I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.

(Virginia Woolf)

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Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.

(Virginia Woolf)

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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 fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

(Virginia Woolf)

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I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything.

(Virginia Woolf)

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How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?

(Virginia Woolf)

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He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

(Virginia Woolf)

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Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.

(Virginia Woolf)

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I want someone to sit beside after the day’s pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy – to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits.

(Virginia Woolf)

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When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness — I am nothing.

(Virginia Woolf)

Check also a couple of educational videos about Virginia Woolf’s life and heritage.