Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf, known professionally as Virginia Woolf, was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 January 1882
CityLondon, England
writing lava madness
As an experience, madness is terrific ... and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.
purses bitterness slipping
Indeed, I thought, slipping the silver into my purse, it is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about.
art war believe
if newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art.
art reading difficult
To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.
believe writing sides
I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross: that it's to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish.
heart numbness break
I grow numb; I grow stiff. How shall I break up this numbness which discredits my sympathetic heart?
art philosophy writing
The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.
taken humor history
What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once.
pain eye squares
Am I alone in my egotism when I say that never does the pale light of dawn filter through the blinds of 52 Tavistock Square but I open my eyes and exclaim, "Good God! Here I am again!" not always with pleasure, often with pain; sometimes in a spasm.
silence silent
One must learn to be silent just as one must learn to talk.
art real world
Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough.
writing profound pleasure
writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.
blessed rivers childhood
O how blessed it would be never to marry, or grow old; but to spend one's life innocently and indifferently among the trees and rivers which alone can keep one cool and childlike in the midst of the troubles of the world!
hero men thinking
It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?... What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.