Virginia Woolf Quotes

One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, "I will always be here."

I'd rather die than fade away

Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable.

I'm not a person who wants to die with my shoes on. I do not think I can be immortal. Maybe my deeds will be immortal. Not me.

Men's fame is like their hair, which grows after they are dead, and with just as little use to them.

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

We just want to be remembered before something is set in stone.

Money, titles, belts - you're not going to take with you when you die. History stays forever. That's why I decided to go for history.

Words have a longevity that I do not have.

When I'm dead are they going to remember me ? I don't really think about it, it's up to them. When I'm dead, who cares ? I don't.

Tomorrow I too – this feeling and thinking soul, the universe I am to myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be someone who no longer walks these streets, someone others will evoke with a vague: 'I wonder what's become of him?” And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passer-by on the daily streets of some city or other.

It's true that the biggest value of life is that it's going to stop. I was thinking when I was in New York the last time that all that we see that has importance is man-made. It isn't nature-made. And when I was looking through the window, looking at New York, I was so moved by humanity's desire for immortality-because that's what it is.

Is there nothing I have done which will outlive me, other than the opprobrium of my first wife and sons and grandchildren? Do I care? Doesn't everybody? Poor me. Poor practically everybody, with so little durable good to leave behind!

We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then. If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us, and it outlives its personal moment. All of my work is deep-dug from me, and every book has to stand or fall without me.

How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?

It's not realistic to imagine that any poem will last forever. Our species won't last forever! We try to capture and preserve our impressions of reality because it's all going away: everything we think and remember, everything we've ever felt, everyone we love.

I don't expect to live forever, nor do I repine over that, but I am weak enough to want to be remembered forever. - Yet how few of those who have lived, even of those who have accomplished far more than I have, linger on in world memory for even a single century after death

Even if it's being a Beatle for the rest of my life, it's still only a temporary thing.

Seeking to perpetuate one's name on earth is like writing on the sand by the seashore; to be perpetual it must be written on eternal shores.

How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present to think of the character and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside and forgotten.

I like to think of my shining tombstone. It gives me, as you might say, something to live for.

I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.

Posterity shall know of me even less than I shall know of posterity.

We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.

Will you remember me when I'm gone?