Virginia Woolf quotes

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

- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

 “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, A Room of One's Own

 “Books are the mirrors of the soul.”  

 ― Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

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

 ― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

 “Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”

― Virginia Woolf

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

― 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

 “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

 “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

 “When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”

― Virginia Woolf

 “The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”

― Virginia Woolf

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

― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

 “Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”

― Virginia Woolf

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

― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own / Three Guineas

 “There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.”

― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

 “Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.”

― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

 “Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

 “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, A Room of One's Own

 “I am rooted, but I flow.”

― 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

 “Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.”

― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

 “Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.”

― Virginia Woolf, Orlando