The quotations of

Virginia Woolf

English modernist writer

1882–1941

24 quotes, most often on Women, Life & Death and Writing.

The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
A Room of One’s Own (1929), Ch. 1, p. 17
- Beauty
The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it.
Jacob’s Room (1922), Ch. 8
- Life & Death
Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.
Three Guineas (1938), Ch. 1, p. 18
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
Mrs Dalloway (1925), Part 1In context
What a lark! What a plunge!
Mrs Dalloway (1925), Part 1In context
- Happiness
- Life & Death
She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.
Mrs Dalloway (1925), Part 1In context
- Life & Death
In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
Mrs Dalloway (1925), Part 1In context
- Life & Death
- Love
Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.
Mrs Dalloway (1925), Part 10In context
- Life & Death
The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in hand, was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained⁠—at last!⁠—the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,⁠—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.
Mrs Dalloway (1925), Part 5In context
- Age
- Experience

Most quoted

People A to Z

C. S. Lewis1898–1963151 quotes

Mark Twain1835–1910151 quotes

Benjamin Franklin1706–179098 quotes

Martin Luther King Jr.1929–196884 quotes

Albert Einstein1879–195595 quotes

Dave Barryborn 1947100 quotes