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
way stills still-life
Still, life had a way of adding day to day
phrases wander higher
I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases.
fall doors feet
Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.
pain virginia blood
For pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space ; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects ; and sounds very remote and then very close ; flesh being gashed and blood sparting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.” — Virginia Woolf, The Waves
heart mrs-dalloway
Fear no more, says the heart...
wall men play
She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell and she had felt that was true of life — one scratched on the wall.
people tyres wheels
When people are happy they have a reserve upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre
silence needs done
I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.
party virginia two
Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going.
dream littles phantoms
Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often not. Life is a dream surely.
children animal vanity
One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.
together territory phrases
But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.
names sometimes grain
Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.
hatred our-love
But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.