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Quotations from
Virginia Woolf [1882-1941]
 | British author Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf was a Modernist and a leader of London's Bloomsbury Group which included John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster, Clive Bell, and Lytton Strachey. Her best-known works occured early, and included the novels "Mrs Dalloway" [1925], "To The Lighthouse" [1927], and "Orlando" [1928], and the book-length essay "A Room of One's Own" [1929]. She had often suffered bouts of depression and by 1940 her writing had stopped and her London home was destroyed during the Blitz of World War II; she drowned herself in the River Ouse at age 59 on 28 March 1941. |
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Virginia Woolf entry at Wikipedia
browse Virginia Woolf Store {returns 250+ titles} at Amazon
4 free Virginia Woolf etexts online at Project Gutenberg
Virginia Woolf Blog fansite [est. 2011]
“Anonymous was a woman.” {Issue #36}
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“Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women?” {blog 12/2008}
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“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
- in her seminal 1929 essay "A Room of One’s Own" {blog 12/2011}
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“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” {blog 5/2012}
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{on cinema}: “The eye licks it all up instantaneously, and the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things
happening without bestirring itself to think.” (in 1926) {blog 11/2013}
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“I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.” -in her diary (entry dated 17 February 1922) {blog 2/2016}
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“Nothing has really happened until it has been described.” {blog 3/2016}
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“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.
But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to
some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery.” - in "A Room of One’s Own", 1929 {blog 5/2016}
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“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?” - in the novel "Night and Day", 1919 {blog 6/2016}
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“Let us never cease from thinking: What is this ‘civilisation’ in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and
why should we take partin them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them?”
- in her anti-war essay “Three Guineas” (1938) {blog 8/2016}
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“As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.” - in "Orlando: A Biography", 1928 {blog 9/2016}
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“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.”
- in her 1922 novel "Jacob’s Room" {blog 11/2016}
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“Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.” {blog 2/2017}
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“At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction
in the world and society has no existence whatsoever.” — in "Orlando: A Biography", 1928 {blog 3/2017}
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“Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”
- in her seminal 1929 essay "A Room of One’s Own" {blog 6/2017}
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“I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.”
- from her diary (entry dated October 2, 1932) {blog 9/2017}
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“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
— from "The Moment and Other Essays" [1947] {blog 11/2017}
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“Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together
and they tear each other to pieces.” - from her 1928 novel "Orlando: A Biography" {blog 12/2017}
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“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.” - in "A Writer's Diary" [1953] {blog 7/2021}
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“To write down one’s impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year, would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography,
for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments upon what we know.” {blog 3/2023}
Virginia Woolf Quotations Not Yet Used on Blog
"Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."
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