Quotes by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

English writer

Lived from: 1882 - 1941

Category: Writers (Contemporary) Country: FlagUnited Kingdom

Born: 25 january 1882 Died: 28 march 1941

  • Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.
  • Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?
  • I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens.
  • Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
  • The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.
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  • If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
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  • It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.
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  • A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
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  • 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.
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  • A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
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  • Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
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  • 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.
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  • Arrange Whatever pieces come your way.
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  • As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
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  • At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.
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  • Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
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  • 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.
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  • 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 very opposite of what it is above.
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  • Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.
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  • Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
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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. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.
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  • 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
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  • For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
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  • 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?
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  • Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.
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What are the most famous quotes from Virginia Woolf?

The two most famous quotes from Virginia Woolf are:

  • "If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people."
  • "It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done."

When did Virginia Woolf live?

Virginia Woolf was born in 1882 and died in the year 1941.