A light here required a shadow there.
Virginia Woolf
- Life
- 1882-1941
- Occupations
- novelist, essayist, autobiographer
- Notable works
- To the Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway, Orlando: A Biography
Facts: Wikidata (CC0), as of 2026-07-09
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf
For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it.
Virginia Woolf
Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
Virginia Woolf
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
Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
Virginia Woolf
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
Virginia Woolf
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well,if one has not dined well.
Virginia Woolf
That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
Virginia Woolf
The artist after all is a solitary being.
Virginia Woolf
Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death… others through sheer inability to cross the street.
Virginia Woolf
Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.
Virginia Woolf
We may enjoy our room in the tower, with the painted walls and the commodious bookcases, but down in the garden there is a man digging who buried his father this morning, and it is he and his like who live the real life and speak the real language.
Virginia Woolf