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
past white long
She belonged to a different age, but being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable --- this interminable life.
library sanctuary spirit
To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.
clever ideas people
No, I'm not clever. I've always cared more for people than for ideas.
mrs-dalloway pity feels
It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.
gifted one-time
I am not so gifted as at one time seemed likely.
dog lying i-love-him
We are about to part," said Neville. "Here are the boxes; here are the cabs. There is Percival in his billycock hat. He will forget me. He will leave my letters lying about among guns and dogs unaswered. I shall send him poems and he will perhaps reply with a picture post card. But it is for that that I love him. I shall propose a meeting - under a clock, by some Cross; and shall wait and he will not come. It is for that that I love him.
lighthouse one-thing
For nothing was simply one thing.
writing eye practice
The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.
flower practice rose
The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
lying semblance
Like" and "like" and "like"--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?
people different made
I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.
dream thinking two
The roar of the traffic, the passage of undifferentiated faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the features from faces. People might walk through me. And what is this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar - forest trees or the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two on its reel; our short progress has been cancelled. I think also that our bodies are in truth naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.
feelings one-day mrs-dalloway
...she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.
writing darkness existence
When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.