Skip to main content

VIRGINIA WOOLF QUOTES


"8_6_Woolf" (CC BY 2.0) by Hackley Public Library

Virginia Woolf is undoubtedly a prolific writer who has produced large amount of quality work. Here is a collection of some of her famous quotes from various books.

"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 want to write a novel about Silence, "he said; "the things people don't say".
-Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

"I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one's own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful. "
-Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

"Anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm. "
- Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“They all dreamt of each other that night, as was natural, considering how thin the partitions were between them, and how strangely they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each other in mid-ocean, and see every detail of each others' faces, and hear whatever they chanced to say.” 
- Virginia Woolf, The Voyage out

"No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes” 
-Virginia Woolf

"The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.” 
-Virginia Woolf

“No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes” 
-Virginia Woolf

"And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honor and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.” 
-Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays

"For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him.” 
-Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays

"Either I shall find it, or I shall not find it. I examine my note-case. I look in all my pockets. These are the things that forever interrupt the process upon which I am eternally engaged of finding some perfect phrase that fits this moment exactly.” 
-Virginia Woolf, The Waves

"Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then—our friends are not able to finish their stories.”
-Virginia Woolf, The Waves

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

"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

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
-Virginia Woolf

"Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
-Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

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

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
-Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“I am rooted, but I flow.”
-Virginia Woolf

“A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.”
-Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“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 thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”
-Virginia Woolf

“When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.”
-Virginia Woolf

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
-Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.”
-Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity. ”
-Virginia Woolf

“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
-Virginia Woolf,  To the Lighthouse

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

VIRGINIA WOOLF AND STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN MRS DALLOWAY

INTRODUCTION The stream of consciousness is a narrative technique on which so many writers have given their views whether they are essayist, novelists etc, but the most well known is Virginia Woolf who is considered as the forerunner of this style of writing. "Influenced by the works of French writer Marcel Proust and Irish writer James Joyce, among others, Woolf strove to create a literary form that would convey inner life. To this end, she elaborated a technique known as stream of consciousness"  (Bouzid) Richardson is the pioneer of the stream of consciousness technique. He is the first 20th century British author to publish a full length stream of consciousness novel Pointed Roofs. On one side was the little grey river, on the other long wet grass repelling and depressing. Not far ahead was the roadway which led, she supposed to the farm where they were to drink new milk. She would have to walk with someone when they came on the road, and talk. She wond...
2 comments
Read more

VIRGINIA WOOLF AND STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

INTRODUCTION "stream of consciousness"(CC BY-SA 2.0) by planeta To the Lighthouse is not an easy novel to read. Its style of writing is quite critical. Readers can get confused because there are none of the standard novelistic signposts telling the readers what is the location, where the action is being done. who is speaking, when this takes place. For example the novel begins with the answer to a question that has not been asked, and that question is answered by the person who has not been described, and addressed to a child who seems to be sitting on the floor in an unspecified location. Every single thing is ambiguous. Nor is there much respect for the standard novelistic conventions of clock time or consecutive action. Woolf seems to delight in confusing the readers by using and inserting a recollection or anticipating a reaction, consequently past and present and future seem to flow into one another in an unbroken stream of consciousness. STREAM OF CONSCI...
2 comments
Read more

VIRGINIA WOOLF AND INTERIOR MONOLOGUE IN HER NOVELS

"Blah Blah Blah (CC BY-NC 2.0)  by  id.-iom INTRODUCTION "A monologue is presented by a single character, most often to express their mental thoughts aloud, though sometimes also to directly address another character or the audience."  (Hargrave) Virginia Woolf beautifully uses both the techniques whether its stream of consciousness or interior monologue she continued to use the same technique in her subsequent novels as well.  It is already mentioned that Woolf was not at all satisfied with the traditional method of writing novels.               In an essay Modern Fiction she had criticized novelist like Arnold Bennet and John Galsworthy for the 'Naturalistic' manner in which they had written their novels. James Joyce probed the same inner consciousness in Ulysses which Woolf probed in Mrs. Dalloway. Although there is an incessant flow of thoughts which has been given the technical name of 'the stream of consc...
1 comment
Read more

WHY DID VIRGINIA WOOLF COMMIT SUICIDE ?

This was the question hitting  everybody's mind when it was declared publicly, that Woolf is no more, she drowned herself into the river Ouse near her house and committed suicide on 28 March, 1941. The above is the news in The New York Times regarding Virginia, who was missing from her house. Sources were saying that she already planned to kill herself because she did not find any charm in her life. Still she neither informed anybody nor she shared it with her husband. Eventually people of her area found her clothes in the river then everyone came to know about the sad demise of her. WHY SHE CHOSE RIVER ONLY ? "Virginia Woolf"(CC BY -SA 2.0) by Wolf Gang Now the question is again unanswered that if she was enjoying her  life with her husband, everything seems to be happy and gay then why she took this decision? Even if she decided to kill herself then why she chose river to be the option ? Why not any other ways to do it? Does she not like her existence...
1 comment
Read more

VIRGINIA WOOLF AND OEDIPUS COMPLEX

INTRODUCTION In Freudian Theory: "The complex of emotions aroused in a young child, typically around the age of four, by an unconscious sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex and wishes to exclude the parent of the same sex. The term was originally applied to boys, the equivalent in girls being called the Electra complex."  (Schuller) Freud's theory of Oedipus complex has become a major theme for various renowned English novelists like example: - D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms, Sophocles’s Oedipus the King  and last but not the least Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Orlando etc. Another thing apart from all the literary techniques, which caught attention while reading To the Lighthouse is the language that Virginia uses to describe James and her mother Mrs. Ramsay’s relationship. One can easily forget that James is Mrs. Ramsay's six year old son and think ...
1 comment
Read more