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Life Quotes by Virginia Woolf

239 Life quotes by Virginia Woolf

All Life quotes Virginia Woolf’s page

Virginia Woolf describes moments when life suddenly bursts open, giving us everything we imagined. She also reflects on how death makes people value life more and how many hidden lives walk among us. Her writing sees the novelist’s vision as a complex mix of characters and deeper truths.

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“Life and a lover”

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Life stand still here.

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“Knitting is the saving of life.”

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Life's bare as a bone.

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Use words that soak up life.

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Oh, I am in love with life!

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How remorseless life is!

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We insist, it seems, on living.

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“To upset everything every 3 or 4 years is my notion of a happy life.”

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... it's been a perpetual discovery, my life. A miracle.

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Like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life.

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“For nothing matters except life; and, of course, order.”

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

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Life would split apart without letters.

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“There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room.”

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I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual

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Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day

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“Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.”

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“Punctuality is one of the minor virtues which we do not acquire until later in life.”

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And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.

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It is probable that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man.

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“S úgy érezte, megint kettesben, szemtől szembe kerültek, ő maga s ellenfele, az élet.”

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By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our…

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Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was…

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I will achieve in my life - Heaven grant that it be not long - some gigantic amalgamation between the two discrepancies…

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“When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have…

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“There's just this….an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us…

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“If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills -…

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

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Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and…

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But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force…

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“I am very tolerant. I am not a moralist. I have too great a sense of the shortness of life and its…

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“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the…

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“There it was before her - life. Life: she thought but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at…

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“It was better to die, like Eugénie and Digby, in the prime of life with all one's faculties about one. But he…

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There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this…

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“The words (she was looking at the window) sounded as if they were floating like flowers on water out there, cut off…

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“That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering…

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“Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it…

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Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia…

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More by Virginia Woolf

Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.

“The train slows and lengthens, as we approach London, the centre, and my heart draws out too, in fear, in exaltation. I am about…

“Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword. On one side all is correct, definite, orderly; the paths…

“Other worshipful objects were content with worship; men, women, God, all let one kneel prostrate; but this form, were it only the shape of…

Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.

“Sometimes he woke with a brain like lead; at others it was as if a thousand wax tapers were alight and people were throwing…

The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life -…

A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.

Love ought to stop on both sides, don’t you think, simultaneously?’ He spoke without any stress on the words, so as not to wake…

“It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to talk. To follow the…

“What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! (...) I think I could happily live here & read forever.”

“what a luxury to be alone once more,”

“...a woman writing thinks back through her mothers.”

“For one's children so often gave one's own perceptions a little thrust forwards.”

“She would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same…