1,646 Quotes by Virginia Woolf

A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing.

Yet, she said to herself, form the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this--love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.

But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.

The root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty.

One should aim, seriously, at disregarding ups and downs; a compliment here, silence there ... the central fact remains stable, which is the fact of my own pleasure in the art.

Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays by Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.