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
world delightful delightful-things
The world is crammed with delightful things
life-is remorseless
How remorseless life is!
literature records discontent
literature is the record of our discontent.
poet contemporary
The poet is always our contemporary.
reading air doors
reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once - hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head - all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response) ...
power dominion loathe
more and more I come to loathe any dominion of one over another; any leadership, any imposition of the will.
christian garden bells
You would get longer livelier and more frequent letters from me, if it weren't for the Christian religion. How that bell tolling at the end of the garden, dum dum, dum dum, annoys me! Why is Christianity so insistent and so sad?
morning lying self
I was lying in bed this morning and saying to myself, 'the remarkable thing about Ethel is her stupendous self-satisfaction' when in came your letter to confirm this profound psychological observation. How delighted I was!
sleep people want
Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?
ghost-stories feelings our-love
How are we to account for the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid which is so much involved in our love of ghost stories?
theory dangerous dangerous-things
Theories then are dangerous things.
wall writing thinking
I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.
ocean sea sky
The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it.
writing heart flags
to write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.