Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf quotes:

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

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

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

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.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

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

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

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

Language is wine upon the lips.

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