Second-hand 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
Topics: Books
To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Professionalism
I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Libraries
Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Aristocracy
Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Charity, Boredom
It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Kindness
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing
Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
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
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
Topics: Men & Women
For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Public
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
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers
One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Adversity
We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even to someone opposite, what we think, then how little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Thought, Thoughts
Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death… others through sheer inability to cross the street.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Apathy
As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Writing
But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Opinion
A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it’s there complete in the mind, if only at the back.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Excellence
The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: The Military, Soldiers
When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Boredom
The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Age
There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they would mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Fashion, Dress
At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Age, Aging
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
Topics: Romance
Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Legacy, Biography
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.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Soul
Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Nature, Women, Men & Women, Men, Men and Women
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Habit, Habits
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Chance, Circumstance
Publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it.
—Virginia Woolf
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- E. M. Forster English Novelist
- Vita Sackville-West British Writer
- D. H. Lawrence English Novelist
- Jeanette Winterson English Novelist
- Jane Austen English Novelist
- Pamela Hansford Johnson English Novelist
- Mary Elizabeth Braddon English Novelist
- Anthony Powell English Novelist
- Rebecca West English Author
- Dinah Craik English Novelist, Poet
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