Virginia Woolf

Quotes

• “Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area. Virginia Wool...”
• “("you wouldn't agree with Virginia Woolf that there is such a thing as a woman's prose style?") I don't know. I am not g...”
• “We have dined well. The fish, the veal cutlets, the wine have blunted the sharp tooth of egotism. Anxiety is at rest. Th...”
• “Lord, how I praise God that I had a bent strong enough to coerce every minute of my life since I was born! This fiddling...”
• “I will use these last pages to sum up our circumstances. A map of the world. [...]I seldom see Lytton; that is true. The...”
• “Of the modern writers, Virginia Woolf is one who consistently attempted to place women at the center of her thinking. Bu...”
• “I like the copious, shapeless, warm, not so very clever, but extremely easy and rather coarse aspect of things; the talk...”
• “Something, perhaps, we must believe in, and as Orlando, we have said, had no belief in the usual divinities she bestowed...”
• “On the towpath we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. The first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to ...”
• “This last week L. has been having a little temperature in the evening, due to malaria, and that due to a visit to Oxford...”
• “Here on this ring of grass we have sat together, bound by the tremendous power of some inner compulsion. The trees wave,...”
• “What is extraordinary is that the hostility the [Bloomsbury] group originally provoked is still with us and is often exp...”
• “I don't like Virginia Woolf that much...I'm interested in Virginia Woolf, the critic. All the texts in The Common Reader...”
• “But delightful though it is to indulge in righteous indignation, it is misplaced if we agree with the lady's-maid that h...”
• “It is also possible to use fictitious characters to highlight an absence, as Virginia Woolf does in A Room of One's Own ...”
• “What a born melancholiac I am! The only way I keep afloat is by working. Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinkin...”
• “I am tired of hearing Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson held up as the matriarchs of feminist and/or women's literature...”
• “Mrs Ramsay sat silent. She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence, uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity...”
• “Our thinking does tend to be dominated-colonized, you might say-by the history of patriarchal thought and language, but ...”
• “Our friends, how seldom visited, how little known - it is true; and yet, when I meet an unknown person, and try to break...”
• “Rita Giacoman is the first hardcore Palestinian feminist we meet. She cites Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, speaks...”
• “I know that Virginia Woolf's entire literary project was to find the space, the frozen moment in time, where the individ...”
• “While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurit...”
• “In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf satirically describes her perplexity at the bulging card catalog of the British M...”
• “When a subject is highly controversial - and any question about sex is that - one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can...”
• “The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average w...”
• “How begin to describe the permission Woolf's feminism and artistry bestowed on the hopeful beginner? For me, her work, w...”
• “Our patience wore rather thin. Visitors do tend to chafe one, though impeccable as friends. L. and I discussed this. He ...”
• “You are not listening to me. You are making phrases about Byron. And while you gesticulate, with your cloak, your cane, ...”
• “They never pulled the curtains till it was too dark to see, nor shut the windows till it was too cold. Why shut out the ...”
• “But can we go to posterity with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those days, with the whole of literature b...”
• “(What women writers, contemporary or historical, well-known or obscure, do you count among your most important literary ...”
• “Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not...”
• “For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry wo...”
• “She felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. There we...”
• “Let us never cease from thinking-what is this 'civilization' in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and w...”
• “I have seen very few people. Nessa came again. How painful these meetings are! Let me try to analyse. Perhaps it is that...”
• “The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments a...”
• “But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything...”
• “Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might ...”
• “We have been to Rodmell, and as usual I come home depressed - for no reason. Merely moods. Have other people as many as ...”
• “The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years,...”
• “Margaret Ll. Davies writes that Janet is dying and will I write on her for The Times - a curious thought, rather: as if ...”
• “She had done the usual trick - been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all li...”
• “When I read Virginia Woolf's Orlando or William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain, I can feel like I'm dying, or I...”
• “An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing the...”
• “We may enjoy our room in the tower, with the painted walls and the commodious bookcases, but down in the garden there is...”
• “I am amused at my relations with her: left so ardent in January - and now what? Also I like her presence and her beauty....”
• “Reading Virginia Woolf's Orlando was an event... it's all right to make your man turn into a woman, it's all right to ha...”
• “Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you becom...”