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
heart adventure winter
What greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into these footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men? That is true: to escape is the greatest of pleasures; street haunting in winter the greatest of adventures.
wall house mind
Anecdote: A house that is rooted to one spot but can travel as quickly as you change your mind and is complete in itself is surely the most desirable of houses. Our modern house with its cumbersome walls and its foundations planted deep in the ground is nothing better than a prison and more and more prison like does it become the longer we live there, and wear fetters of a association and sentiment.
money writing novel
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
women hate heart
Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?
writing sight personality
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
cat men surfing
Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.
country men intelligent
There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.
writing literature ifs
This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.
running book thinking
Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep.
crafts stills
Life stand still here.
larks plunge
What a lark! What a plunge!
voice mind doubt
There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.
book reading heart
A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.
sea deeper
But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.