Virginia Woolf Quotes

So far as love or affection is concerned, psychologists have failed in their mission. The little we know about love does not transcend simple observation, and the little we write about it has been written better by poets and novelists.

I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.

Love is mainly an affair of short spasms. If these spasms disappoint us, love dies. It is very seldom that it weathers the experience and becomes friendship.

Every woman dreams of love. When she is young she prays she will find it. When she is middle aged she hopes for it and when she is old she remembers it.

women have no existence except in love; the history of their life begins and ends with love!

The hallmark of my books is the relationships that define women's lives.

I love being a woman. I like dressing up; I love buying shoes.

In books by women and for women, it should come as no surprise that heroines are the heroes of the action, finding themselves, their power and their future through love.

It is possible to say that all of my books concern themselves with the notion of what it means to be female - whether it is in New York City in 2000 or Calcutta in 1836. In that way, my books really are the same.

Being a woman means everything to me.

Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!

This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible. And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be.

Love, the one supreme, unceasing source of human felicity, the one sole joy which lifts the whole mortal existence into the empyrean, was by it [Christianity] degraded into the mere mechanical action of reproduction.

The three main extra-rational activities in modern life are religion, war, and love. all these are extra-rational, but love is not anti-rational, that is to say, a reasonable man may reasonably rejoice in its existence

You may very well fall in love with somebody who makes less money, who's younger than you, who weighs less than you.

Love with men is not a sentiment, but an idea.

For love is sufficient unto love.

To feel, to love, to suffer, to devote herself, will always be the text of the life of woman.

Till I loved I never lived.

Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then. It is something to think of, and gives her a sort of distinction among her companions

Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love.

I always just loved women, but more important than loving women, more important than sexual stuff, is I always believed in romance.

The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open.

One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion.

Without love, most of life remains concealed. Nothing is as fascinating as love, unfortunately.