Quotations from

Virginia Woolf

About

Picture of Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf ( "wolf"; née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer and one of the most influential 20th-century modernist authors. She helped to pioneer the use of stream of consciousness narration as a literary device.

from Wikipedia

Quotes from Virginia Woolf

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

—Virginia Woolf

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

—Virginia Woolf

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

—Virginia Woolf

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

—Virginia Woolf

If people are highly successful in their professions they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion—the relations between one thing and another. Humanity goes.

—Virginia Woolf

Indeed, I thought, slipping the silver into my purse, it is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about.

—Virginia Woolf

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.

—Virginia Woolf

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

—Virginia Woolf

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

—Virginia Woolf

There is no greater mistake than the hasty conclusion that opinions are worthless because they are badly argued.

—Virginia Woolf

A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life.

—Virginia Woolf

I have lost friends, some by death… others through sheer inability to cross the street.

—Virginia Woolf

All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are "sides," and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot. As people mature they cease to believe in sides or in headmasters or in highly ornamental pots.

—Virginia Woolf