Photographic portrait, 1902George Charles Beresford; restoration by Adam Cuerden · Public domain

488 collected words

Virginia Woolf

Life dates: 1882 AD — 1941 AD

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01c. 1911 AD

Human relations, at least between the sexes, were carried on as relations between countries are now - with ambassadors, and treaties. The parties concerned met on the great occasion of the proposal. If this were refused, a state of war was declared.

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02c. 1911 AD

The immense success of our life, is I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it.

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03c. 1911 AD

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

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04c. 1911 AD

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

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05c. 1911 AD

As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.

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06c. 1911 AD

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.

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07c. 1911 AD

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

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08c. 1911 AD

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

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09c. 1911 AD

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

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10c. 1911 AD

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.

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11c. 1911 AD

An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know.All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was!-that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant . . .

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12c. 1911 AD

Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.

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13c. 1911 AD

Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.

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14c. 1911 AD

Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.

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15c. 1911 AD

For we think back through our mothers if we are women.

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16c. 1911 AD

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

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17c. 1911 AD

Chastity ... has, even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest.

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18c. 1911 AD

It is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about. No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house, and clothing are mine forever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me.

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19c. 1911 AD

And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. (...) almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. (...) [women in fiction were] not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that

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20c. 1911 AD

One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man

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21c. 1911 AD

Literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women

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22c. 1911 AD

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. (...) Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own

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23c. 1911 AD

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

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24c. 1911 AD

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

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