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
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: Friendship, Time, Maturity
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Order
There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they would mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Fashion, Dress
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: Reason, Thought, Truth, Thinking
Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death… others through sheer inability to cross the street.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Apathy
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
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
Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night… shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Autobiography, Legacy
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: Adversity, Laughter, Beauty
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
The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Age
We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even to someone opposite, what we think, then how little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Thought, Thoughts
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
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Honesty, Truth
When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Arguments
Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure.
—Virginia Woolf
Second-hand are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Books
To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Control, Self-Control
What is meant by “reality”? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Reality
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
Every season is likeable, and wet days and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life, can be full of dreams; and the most common actions
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Sleep
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, Colleges, Universities
When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Boredom
Now, aged 50, I’m just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Age
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
The mind is the most capricious of insects – flitting, fluttering.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Mind
I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Innocence
It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is, and if an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater service to humanity; and we should have the immense pleasure into the bargain of watching Professor X rush for his measuring-rods to prove himself “superior.”
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Men & Women
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Idleness, Laziness
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
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