Virginia Woolf (1882–1941,) born Adeline Virginia Stephen, was an English novelist, essayist, and critic. She made her mark not only as a modernist writer but also as one of the foremost feminist intellectuals of the twentieth century. Her nonlinear approaches to narrative exerted a significant influence on the genre.
Born in London to the famous Victorian scholar Leslie Stephen, Woolf was educated at home and, in 1913, married Leonard Woolf, writer, and publisher of The Hogarth Press. In spite of recurrent bouts of acute mental depression and failing health, Woolf persevered to write a large output of essays, reviews, and novels. She founded the Bloomsbury Group, a group of artists, critics, and writers that included economist John Maynard Keynes, biographer Lytton Strachey, novelist E. M. Forster, painter Duncan Grant, and critic Roger Fry.
Wolfe gained recognition with Jacob’s Room (1922,) Mrs Dalloway (1925,) To the Lighthouse (1927,) and Orlando (1928.) These are written in her innovative narrative technique in which the conventional storyline is replaced by an emphasis on the inner, psychological states of Woolf’s characters.
Wolfe’s A Room of One’s Own (1929,) a survey of the difficulties confronting women, became a landmark of feminist literature. Her critical essays, including Modern Novels (1919) and The Common Reader (1925,) are now considered indispensable to modernist literary theory.
Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse in Sussex during a protracted bout of depression caused by the outbreak of war in 1941.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Virginia Woolf
What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment.
—Virginia Woolf
Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Human Nature, Humanity
As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Women
All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Authors & Writing
Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Men, Nature, Men and Women, Men & Women, Women
One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Maturity, Friendship, Time
One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats—and one always secretes too much jelly.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Quotations
Tom’s great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face—as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; and thought.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Face, Faces
When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Boredom
To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Professionalism
It will be all over this day week – comfort – discomfort; and the zest and rush that no engagements, hours, habits give. Then we shall take them up again with more than the zest of traveling.
—Virginia Woolf
Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Winter
Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Adversity
It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Kindness
What could be more charming than a boy before he has begun to cultivate his intellect? He is beautiful to look at; he gives himself no airs; he understands the meaning of art and literature instinctively; he goes about enjoying his life and making other people enjoy theirs.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Youth
A strange thing has happened—while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.
—Virginia Woolf
For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Medicine, Doctors
Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Thinking, Thought, Reason, Truth
Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Books, Literature
The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Age
It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Humankind, Action
Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Boredom, Charity
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: War
That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Childhood, Youth
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Romance
As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Writing
My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery—always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: The Mind, Mind
If we didn’t live adventurously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I’ve no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Adventure
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