About Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
Born: 25 January 1882, Kensington, London, United Kingdom
Died: 28 March 1941, Lewes, United Kingdom
100 Top Quotes by Virginia Woolf in English
- “The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw.”
- “The most powerful and the most lasting beauty is the one that is entirely spontaneous.”
- “It is in the nature of the artist to make their own rules and then break them.”
- “The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth. The unwary individual who on entering takes a few steps is soon lost in its windings.”
- “There are no signposts in the sea.”
- “The mind is a complex and ever-changing entity, capable of infinite combinations of thought and emotion.”
- “The only way to escape the corruptible effect of praise is to go on working.”
- “The habit of writing for my eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.”
- “There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them.”
- “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
- “The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.”
- “No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
- “It is only by putting one’s life on the line that the soul is able to speak.”
- “To write requires an ego, a belief that what you say matters.”
- “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
- “The moment was all; the moment was enough.”
- “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
- “It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”
- “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”
- “The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
- “Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
- “The mind is everything; what you think, you become.”
- “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”
- “One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.”
- “Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.”
- “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.”
- “Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”
- “I have lost friends, some by death… others by sheer inability to cross the street.”
- “We are but the sum of our experiences.”
- “One can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes.”
- “The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
- “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”
- “The world is not to be put in order. The world is order. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.”
- “The past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
- “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”
- “I am rooted, but I flow.”
- “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
- “In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.”
- “Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
- “We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings are not like mathematics.”
- “It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of buses.”
- “The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
- “A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.”
- “I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”
- “If one is going to tell a story with a woman as the heroine, one must inevitably begin with the day when she was born and womanhood lies in her dreams.”
- “You can’t fight against the future. Time is on our side.”
- “What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”
- “A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.”
- “The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths.”
- “The eyes of others are our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
- “The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
- “I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”
- “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
- “The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.”
- “The world is not to be put in order. The world is order. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.”
- “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.”
- “As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”
- “I am rooted, but I flow.”
- “There is no denying the fact that both the past and the future are ultimately unknowable and uncertain. The only thing that is certain is the present moment.”
- “The man who invented happiness forgot to include himself in the equation.”
- “The man who invented happiness forgot to include himself in the equation.”
- “The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.”
- “The world is a huge thing. It is what it is.”
- “There are no boundaries to human thought.”
- “The habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.”
- “If we do not believe in ourselves, we are doomed to failure.”
- “It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”
- “Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.”
- “To write something you have to risk making a fool of yourself.”
- “Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”
- “There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral – immoral from the scientific point of view.”
- “My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?”
- “What does the brain matter compared with the heart?”
- “The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent, like Shakespeare’s mind when he wrote the last act of ‘Macbeth.'”
- “All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.”
- “The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
- “It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.”
- “The telephone is an annoying and impertinent interruption of our more serious occupations.”
- “There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music.”
- “The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move.”
- “The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
- “The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.”
- “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”
- “If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
- “It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.”
- “For if one is oneself a wife, presumably one retains some of that atmosphere; one knows marriage at first hand. On the other hand, those who are not wives, and have husbands, have, so far as I can see, no atmosphere at all.”
- “The only thing that makes life endurable in this world is human love, and yet, according to Christianity, that is the very thing that we are not to have in the other world.”
- “The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
- “The most ordinary human motives work out into quite different results.”
- “The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
- “It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of buses.”
- “The moment was all; the moment was enough.”
- “Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”
- “The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
- “The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
- “It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of buses.”
- “The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.”
- “I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.
FAQs:
Who was Virginia Woolf?
Virginia Woolf was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the Bloomsbury Group, a group of artists and intellectuals who lived and worked in London in the early 20th century. She lived from 1882 to 1941.
What are some of Virginia Woolf’s most famous works?
Some of Virginia Woolf’s most famous works include “Mrs. Dalloway,” “To the Lighthouse,” “Orlando,” and “A Room of One’s Own.”
What was Virginia Woolf’s writing style like?
Virginia Woolf’s writing style was often experimental and characterized by a stream-of-consciousness technique that conveyed the inner thoughts and emotions of her characters. She was also known for her use of symbolism and imagery.
Was Virginia Woolf a feminist?
Yes, Virginia Woolf was a feminist and wrote extensively on women’s issues. In “A Room of One’s Own,” she argued that women needed both financial independence and a space of their own in order to be able to write and create.
Did Virginia Woolf have any mental health issues?
Yes, Virginia Woolf suffered from mental health issues throughout her life, including depression and bipolar disorder. She ultimately took her own life in 1941.
What was Virginia Woolf’s relationship with the Bloomsbury Group?
Virginia Woolf was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group and was friends with many of its members, including Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster, and Vanessa Bell. The group was known for its liberal, bohemian lifestyle and its interest in art, literature, and social issues.
Did Virginia Woolf ever work as a journalist?
Yes, Virginia Woolf worked as a journalist and critic throughout her career, writing for publications such as The Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian.
What was Virginia Woolf’s relationship with her husband, Leonard Woolf?
Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf were married in 1912 and had a close and supportive relationship. Leonard Woolf also played an important role in Virginia Woolf’s literary career, founding the Hogarth Press with her.
What impact did Virginia Woolf have on literature?
Virginia Woolf is considered one of the most important writers of the 20th century and her work had a significant impact on the development of modernist literature. She was a pioneer in exploring the interior lives of her characters and in using innovative narrative techniques.
What is Virginia Woolf’s legacy?
Virginia Woolf’s legacy is one of artistic innovation and feminist activism. Her work continues to be studied and celebrated today, and she is seen as a trailblazer for women writers and a champion of women’s rights.
