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
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
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: Life, Living
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.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Intelligence
The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Soldiers, The Military
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: Time, Friendship, Maturity
Humor is the first gift to perish in a foreign language.
—Virginia Woolf
Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Charity, Boredom
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Habit, Habits
A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it’s there complete in the mind, if only at the back.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Excellence
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing
Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: People
Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Dying, Death
I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Libraries
This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Soul
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
Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Language
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Laziness, Idleness
In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Memories, Solitude
Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all—save “a man with a red moustache,” “a young man in gray smoking a pipe.”
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: People, Past, Past and Present, Self-Discovery, Reflection
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
At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Aging, Age
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: People
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
The first duty of a lecturer is to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Teaching, Teachers, Education
Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Legacy, Biography
All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: 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
To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Journalism
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
Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Reading, Books, Literature
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