Virginia Woolf Quotes

English modernist writer (1882–1941)

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Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941), born Adeline Virginia Stephen, was a British writer who is considered to be one of the foremost modernist/feminist literary figures of the twentieth century.

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Birth Name: Adeline Virginia Stephen • Adeline Virginia Alexandra Stephen

Alternative Names: Virginia Stephen • Adeline Virginia Woolf • Virginia Adeline Woolf • Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf • Virginia Stephen Woolf • Adeline Virginia Alexandra Woolf

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I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?

There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

Society is the most powerful conception in the world and society has no existence whatsoever.

Margaret Ll. Davies writes that Janet is dying and will I write on her for The Times – a curious thought, rather: as if it mattered who wrote, or not. But this flooded me with the idea of Janet yesterday. I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person.

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

She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.

I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.

To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!

My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.

The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing. His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman's grace.

Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

Life stand still here.

But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects; and sounds very remote and then very close; flesh being gashed and blood spurting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.