Virginia Woolf Women Quotations

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

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.

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.

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

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

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

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

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

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

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

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man, at twice its natural size

Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays by Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?

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

I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens.

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

A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.

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

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

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

The first duty of a lecturer: to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks, and keep on the mantelpiece forever.

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man; some think even greater.