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
happiness men world
To be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.
self literature may
A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.
spirit divine mouthpiece
We shall be the mouthpieces of the divine spirit—
women army blessing
Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays by Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?
thinking arguing argument
When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument.
water ingredients lectures
You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures.
life bones
Life's bare as a bone.
lying reality men
Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees ... one's happiness, one's reality?
life children silver
So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life, and whether this is living.
believe lips opinion
But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying.
war fighting sky
The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gasmask handy, it is our business to puncture gasbags and discover the seeds of truth.
happiness littles strings
Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves.
morning writing tired
To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm's way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin.
animal self leader
Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody.