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
thinking years voice
Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
beautiful communication mean
For it is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they can only say 'good to eat' when they mean 'beautiful' and the other way about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves.
block reading amber
I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.
book people wanted
People only become writers if they can't find the one book they've always wanted to read.
facts world whole-world
To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?
men two brain
In each of us two powers preside, one male, one female: and in the man's brain, the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman's brain, the woman predominates over the man...If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties.
book self suits
Thus Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Douglas and Mr. Joyce partly spoil their books for women readers by their display of self-conscious virility; and Mr. Hemingway, but much less violently, follows suit.
chance knows
Nothing, I know, had any chance against death.
writing people ask-me
People ask me why I write. I write to find out what I know.
world fool genius
Consolation for those moments when you can't tell whether you're the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.
world commit treachery
There was no treachery too base for the world to commit.
writing demand may
And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is a woman's whole existence...
art mystery danger
We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do not always come apart is the animating tension of all art.
centre presses
I press to my centre, and find there is something there.