Women Quotes by Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

Women alone stir my imagination.

— Virginia Woolf

“Women's rights, that antediluvian topic.”

— Virginia Woolf

War is not women's history.

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

“I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

Why have I so little control? It is the case of much waste and pain in my life.

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known…

— Virginia Woolf

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural…

— Virginia Woolf

“As for the beauty of women, it is like the light on the sea, never constant to a single wave. They all…

— Virginia Woolf

“Her thoughts became mysteriously tightened and strung up as if a piano tuner had put his key in her back and stretched…

— Virginia Woolf

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men.…

— Virginia Woolf

“Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at…

— Virginia Woolf

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the…

— Virginia Woolf

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with…

— Virginia Woolf

“It is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about. No force…

— Virginia Woolf

“Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. (...) Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have…

— Virginia Woolf

Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have…

— 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

“Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook…

— Virginia Woolf

I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among…

— Virginia Woolf

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of utmost importance; very…

— Virginia Woolf

“Yet even when they were freed from the practical impediments imposed upon their sex, they could not write because they had no…

— Virginia Woolf

“And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it…

— 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

“However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through…

— Virginia Woolf

“The questions that we have to ask and to answer about that procession during this moment of transition are so important that…

— Virginia Woolf

“An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could…

— Virginia Woolf

“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or…

— Virginia Woolf

“We think back through our mothers and grandmothers, if we are women.”

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

The first duty of a lecturer: to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between…

— Virginia Woolf

women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. ... Women, then, have not…

— Virginia Woolf