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
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Truth, Honesty
Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. More than anything… it calls for confidence in oneself…And how can we generate this imponderable quality most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Confidence
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
—Virginia Woolf
The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Beauty, Adversity, Laughter
The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: The Military, Soldiers
Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Sex, Humankind
When a subject is highly controversial… one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Audiences
You send a boy to school in order to make friends – the right sort.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: School
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Pain
To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Professionalism
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
The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Life, Happiness, Love, Awareness, Perception
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
By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.
—Virginia Woolf
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Living, Life
For love… has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Love
Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Thinking, Genius
Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Human Nature, Humanity
All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Authors & Writing
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
At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Aging, Age
All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are sides and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster a highly ornamental pot. As people mature, they cease to believe in sides or in Headmasters or in highly ornamental pots.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Men & Women
We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Peace
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
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Women
I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again—as I always am when I write.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Books, Literature
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: People
Publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it.
—Virginia Woolf
But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world—a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Identity
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
One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Adversity
These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Age
Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: The Mind, Mind
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Order
Humor is the first gift to perish in a foreign language.
—Virginia Woolf
Now the writer, I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of … reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Writing, Realism
The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Life
If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war?—not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Education, Universities, Colleges
Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Opportunity, Acceptance
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