Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer
Source: The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928
xy
@xy, member from Sept. 25, 2023Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own
Ch. 3, p. 72) http://books.google.com/books?id=CoP1GxjoNnsC&q=&quot;The+history+of+men's+opposition+to+women's+emancipation+is+more+interesting+perhaps+than+the+story+of+that+emancipation+itself&quot;&pg=PA72#v=onepage <br class="br">Source: A Room of One's Own (1929)
“I have lost friends, some by death… others by sheer inability to cross the street.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer
“Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.”
Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography
Source: Orlando
Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own
Very often misquoted as "For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
Variant: Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 3, p. 51
“Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. --Bernard, The Waves”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer
“I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”
Virginia Woolf book Moments of Being
Source: Moments of Being
“Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence”
Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway
Source: Mrs. Dalloway
“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?”
Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway
Source: Mrs. Dalloway
“Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.”
Virginia Woolf The Common Reader
"Modern Fiction"
The Common Reader (1925)
Context: Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. 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. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.
“All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.”
Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography
Source: Orlando