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
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
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
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
In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Memories, Solitude
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers
Most of a modest woman’s life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Pregnancy, Birth
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
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
For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Public
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
Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Men and Women, Men, Men & Women, Women, Nature
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, Women, Nature, Men and Women, 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
To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Control, Self-Control
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
One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Adversity
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, Thinking, Truth, Thought
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Honesty, Truth
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
Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Boredom, Charity
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
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
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
You send a boy to school in order to make friends – the right sort.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: School
Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, 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: Literature, Books
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
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Habit, Habits
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
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
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Women
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
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
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
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
The mind is the most capricious of insects – flitting, fluttering.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Mind
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
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
When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Boredom
Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Conformity
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