Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

Virginia Woolf Novelist

  • Gender: Female
  • Citizenship: England
  • Born: Jan 25, 1882
  • Died: Mar 28, 1941

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando, and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own, with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Woolf suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life, thought to have been the result of what is now termed bipolar disorder, and committed suicide by drowning in 1941 at the age of 59.

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.

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

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.

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

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

The connection between dress and war is not far to seek your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.

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.

Some people go to priests others to poetry I to my friends.

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.

We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.

I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.