Life & Wisdom Quote by Virginia Woolf

Age, Woolf suggests, doesn’t sand down desire; it sharpens your appetite for what polite society keeps under glass. “Indecency” here isn’t just the naughty postcard version of sex or swear words. It’s the wider, more combustible category: unruly candor, bodily fact, forbidden talk, the refusal to perform respectability on command. The line works because it flips the usual narrative of aging as moral stiffening. Instead of becoming cleaner, we become less interested in cleaning up for other people.

Woolf’s intent feels double-edged. On the surface, it’s a mischievous confession, the sort of aside that punctures drawing-room propriety with a pin. Underneath is a critique of the social machine that calls itself “decency” while policing women’s voices, bodies, and ambitions. In early 20th-century Britain, decorum wasn’t a neutral virtue; it was a class technology and a gendered gag. To “like indecency” is to like what breaks the gag.

There’s also an artist’s subtext: the older writer, more practiced at watching humans, grows impatient with euphemism. Indecency becomes a synonym for the real texture of life - messy, lustful, cruel, funny. Time grants perspective, and perspective makes pretense look thin. The line’s sly power is that it frames liberation not as youthful rebellion but as a late-blooming competence: you learn which rules are merely costumes, and you stop applauding the costume.