Poetry Quotes by Virginia Woolf

Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.

— Virginia Woolf

I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you.

— Virginia Woolf

And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover.

— Virginia Woolf

And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.

— Virginia Woolf

The poet is always our contemporary.

— Virginia Woolf

My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.

— Virginia Woolf

Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?

— Virginia Woolf

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

“Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. --Bernard, The Waves”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

“Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

— Virginia Woolf

“What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”

— Virginia Woolf

Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time.

— Virginia Woolf

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire.

— Virginia Woolf

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

— Virginia Woolf

“Now, again, he paused, and into the breach thus made, leapt Ambition, the harridan, and Poetry, the witch, and Desire of Fame,…

— Virginia Woolf

And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute…

— Virginia Woolf

The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme,…

— Virginia Woolf

“[Judith Shakespeare] lives in you and in me [...] she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they…

— Virginia Woolf

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall…

— Virginia Woolf

“Translating this to the spiritual regions as their wont is, the poets sang beautifully how roses fade and petals fall. The moment…

— Virginia Woolf

Tell me", he wanted to say, "everything in the whole world" - for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about…

— Virginia Woolf

London perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my…

— Virginia Woolf

That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience…

— Virginia Woolf

Reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty…

— Virginia Woolf

We read Charlotte Bronte not for exquisite observation of character, not for comedy, not for a philosophic view of life, but for…

— Virginia Woolf

The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the…

— Virginia Woolf

“He will forget me. He will leave my letters lying about among guns and dogs unanswered. I shall send him poems and…

— Virginia Woolf

We are about to part," said Neville. "Here are the boxes; here are the cabs. There is Percival in his billycock hat.…

— Virginia Woolf

A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her…

— Virginia Woolf

“(W)hy is poetry wholly an elderly taste? When I was twenty I could not for the life of me read Shakespeare for…

— Virginia Woolf

“I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir…

— Virginia Woolf

“but what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare’s sister as I had made it,…

— Virginia Woolf

“For if it is rash to walk into a lion’s den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash…

— Virginia Woolf

“So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so to propitiate the austere spirit of…

— Virginia Woolf

“I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir…

— Virginia Woolf

“How, in so short a time, she had passed from intoxication to disgust we will only seek to explain by supposing that…

— Virginia Woolf

“Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite,…

— Virginia Woolf

“Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life,…

— Virginia Woolf