Best Quotes by Virginia Woolf (Top 10)
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I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
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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One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
Virginia Woolf
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Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
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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The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
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
More Virginia Woolf Quotes
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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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I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
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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The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
Virginia Woolf
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I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street.
Virginia Woolf
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To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away...
Virginia Woolf
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I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual
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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Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
Virginia Woolf
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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
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The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
Virginia Woolf
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I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
Virginia Woolf
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It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Virginia Woolf
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Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
Virginia Woolf
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I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky.
Virginia Woolf
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It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
Virginia Woolf
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And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of treesand changing leaves.
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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A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life
Virginia Woolf
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You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
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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Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
Virginia Woolf
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Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
Virginia Woolf
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On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
Virginia Woolf
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Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?
Virginia Woolf
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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
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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.
Virginia Woolf
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The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
Virginia Woolf
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Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. AndI, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, oftennot. Life is a dream surely."
Virginia Woolf
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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.
Virginia Woolf
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I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.
Virginia Woolf
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Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.
Virginia Woolf
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Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
Virginia Woolf
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Language is wine upon the lips.
Virginia Woolf
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I feel certain that I'm going mad again, I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices
Virginia Woolf
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One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.
Virginia Woolf
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The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.
Virginia Woolf
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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
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Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
Virginia Woolf
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Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.
Virginia Woolf
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In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.
Virginia Woolf
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The first duty of a lecturer: to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks, and keep on the mantelpiece forever.
Virginia Woolf
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What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once.
Virginia Woolf
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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
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As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
Virginia Woolf
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When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
Virginia Woolf
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Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
Virginia Woolf