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"Chastity ... has, even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest."
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"Oleanders have attractive flowers, they decorate nature beautifully, but they are poisonous; and a woman is an oleander; it's all right to watch her once in a while, but then you must walk away without touching her; if you ever try to taste her even once, you'll head for hell!"

"Most often women want happiness and men want wilderness."

"When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women."

"Men as a class appear to be 'at risk, ' maybe even at high risk."

"And a woman by herself is missing a man, while a man by himself is his own master. Trousers. That's the secret. Trousers and a pair of socks. I never dreamed it was like this. Put on trousers and the world changes. We walk different. We act different. I see these girls and I think: Idiot's Get yourself some trousers!"

"Women are binding and men are commanding."

"I'll never forget the first time Davram took me by the scruff of my neck and showed me he was the stronger of us. It was magnificent! If a woman is stronger than her husband, she comes to despise him. She has the choice of either tyrannizing him or else making herself less in order not to make him less. If the husband is strong enough, though, she can be as strong as she is, as strong as she can grow to be."

"Women often forget that the man she is complaining about is a creation of a mother like her."

"You see only the cat's paw, Signor Tartini, whereas I see the sharp claws hidden in that paw!.. Women are like fire; they warm you from afar, and when you enter into them they burn you to ashes!"
Explore more quotes by Virginia Woolf


"James was sixteen, Cam seventeen, perhaps. She had looked round for someone who was not there, for Mrs. Ramsay, presumably. But there was only kind Mrs. Beckwith turning over her sketches under the lamp. Then, being tired, her mind still rising and falling with the sea, the taste and smell that places have after long absence possessing her, the candles wavering in her eyes, she had lost herself and gone under. It was a wonderful night, starlit; the waves sounded as they went upstairs; the moon surprised them, enormous, pale, as they passed the staircase window. She had slept at once."


"There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking."


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


"The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own."


"Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders."


"It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others."


"Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say."
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