20 quotations, each verified against its source and credited to the work it comes from — the wording as Virginia Woolf wrote or said it, not as the internet passes it around.
How these quotes were checked
Virginia Woolf's most quoted sentences come from A Room of One's Own (1929) and Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and every line in this collection is verified against those complete texts — with the Anon sentence checked against the 1929 first edition.
Woolf also attracts invented quotations at a remarkable rate; the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain keeps a running list. The two most famous cases are documented below.
A sentence linked to Virginia Woolf may be exact, shortened, remembered by someone else, or unsupported. Each label below explains what the available evidence actually proves.
A modern compression of a real sentence in chapter three of A Room of One's Own: “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” The paraphrase keeps the idea and loses her phrasing.
The line was written by David Hare for the film of The Hours (2002), where Nicole Kidman, playing Woolf, says “You do not find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.” It appears nowhere in Woolf's own writings, but the film's popularity attached it to her permanently.
…a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction…
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.
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.
Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters;
An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps.
“But I do not know,” said Peter Walsh, “what I feel.”
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another.
Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
For nothing was simply one thing.
I have had my vision.
“I see a ring,” said Bernard, “hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.”
Bernard says there is always a story. I am a story. Louis is a story.
But here I am nobody. I have no face.
Is it Paris, is it London where we sit, or some southern city of pink-washed houses lying under cypresses, under high mountains, where eagles soar?
I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz.
Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
Every book with a quote collection of its own, each line verified against the text.
Not in those words. The real sentence, in chapter three of A Room of One's Own (1929), is: “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” The popular version is a modern paraphrase.
No. David Hare wrote the line for the 2002 film The Hours, where the Woolf character says it to her husband Leonard. It appears nowhere in Woolf's writings.
Woolf's argument, from the 1929 essay of that name, is material: “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Independence of mind starts with an income and a door that shuts — she proposes five hundred pounds a year and a lock on the door.
“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” The novel follows one June day in 1923 as Clarissa Dalloway prepares to give a party.
The real sentence begins “One cannot think well” — from chapter one of A Room of One's Own. The “eat well” version is a misquote that has appeared even on shopping bags.
In A Room of One's Own she answers the refusal on the page: “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 sources below are the editions, archives, and full-text searches used to verify the quotations on this page. Every line was checked against one or more of them before it appeared here.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Virginia Woolf page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Virginia Woolf page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Virginia Woolf page.
Verification is the point of this collection: a quotation is listed only when its wording has been checked against the sources above, and the attribution notes record what each check found about the famous lines that failed.
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