Wolff Wisdom

I think I have posted Virginia Wolff's wisdom before, but somehow it seems fresh and today, so here they are, shards, thoughts, ideas.

Glenn Buttkus


These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
Virginia Woolf
- More quotations on: [Men And Women]

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

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929)
- More quotations on: [Opinions]

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929)

I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.
Virginia Woolf, Diary, 17 February 1922

I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)



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.
Virginia Woolf

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.
Virginia Woolf

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

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
Virginia Woolf

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
Virginia Woolf

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

Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
Virginia Woolf

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

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

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.
Virginia Woolf

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
Virginia Woolf

For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?
Virginia Woolf

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.
Virginia Woolf

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
Virginia Woolf

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.
Virginia Woolf

I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.
Virginia Woolf

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

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

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.
Virginia Woolf

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