Quotes

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

Virginia Woolf

If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

Virginia Woolf

If we didn't live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.

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

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

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

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

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

Virginia Woolf

I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.

Virginia Woolf

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

Virginia Woolf

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

Virginia Woolf

For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?

Virginia Woolf

For love... has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together that you cannot separate them.

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

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

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

Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.

Virginia Woolf

But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? - the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world - a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.

Virginia Woolf