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
dust arches meteors
Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
hurt children pain
I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together.
real laughing people
Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it.
insanity age veils
A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.
song book library
Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers.
notebook phrases stories
I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?
thinking important too-much
The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme -- thinking too much.
children growing-up long
They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.
being-in-love people strange
But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.
wine tongue lips
Language is wine upon the lips.
flower mrs-dalloway said
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
heart brain matter
What does the brain matter compared with the heart?
confidence love-yourself eye
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
women interesting feminism
Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?