Virginia Woolf quotes
Virginia Woolf
Birthdate: 25. January 1882
Date of death: 28. March 1941
Other names: Adeline Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer who is considered one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century, and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Born in an affluent household in Kensington, London, she attended the King's College London and was acquainted with the early reformers of women's higher education.
Having been home-schooled for most part of her childhood, mostly in English classics and Victorian literature, Woolf began writing professionally in 1900. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. She published her first novel titled The Voyage Out in 1915, through the Hogarth Press, a publishing house that she established with her husband, Leonard Woolf. Her best-known works include the novels Mrs Dalloway , To the Lighthouse and Orlando , and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own , with its dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
Woolf became one of the central subjects of the 1970s movement of feminist criticism, and her works have since garnered much attention and widespread commentary for "inspiring feminism", an aspect of her writing that was unheralded earlier. Her works are widely read all over the world and have been translated into more than fifty languages. She suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life and took her own life by drowning in 1941 at the age of 59.
Works
A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
Between the Acts
Virginia Woolf
The Voyage Out
Virginia Woolf
Night and Day
Virginia Woolf
The Years
Virginia Woolf
Moments of Being
Virginia Woolf
A Letter to a Young Poet
Virginia Woolf
Monday or Tuesday
Virginia WoolfQuotes Virginia Woolf
„If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.“
"The Leaning Tower", lecture delivered to the Workers' Educational Association, Brighton (May 1940)
The Moment and Other Essays (1948)
„No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.“
Source: A Room of One's Own / Three Guineas
„As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.“
— Virginia Woolf, book Orlando: A Biography
Source: Orlando: A Biography (1928), Ch. 6
„And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.“
— Virginia Woolf, book The Waves
Source: The Waves
„It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.“
Variant: It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality
Source: The Death of the Moth and Other Essays
„What does the brain matter compared with the heart?“
— Virginia Woolf, book Mrs Dalloway
Source: Mrs. Dalloway
„The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman.“
"Women and Fiction"
Granite and Rainbow (1958)
Context: The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life … it is only when we can measure the way of life and the experience of life made possible to the ordinary woman that we can account for the success or failure of the extraordinary woman as a writer.
„Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.“
— Virginia Woolf, book Jacob's Room
Source: Jacob's Room
„Books are the mirrors of the soul.“
— Virginia Woolf, book Between the Acts
Source: Between the Acts
„Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.“
The Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/tag/virginia-woolf/ traces the origin of such statements to The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan (1932), where the diarist states:
We were sitting one morning two Summers ago, Ferenc Molnár, Dr. Rudolf Kommer and I, in the little garden of a coffee-house in the Austrian Tyrol. “Your writing?” we asked him. “How do you regard it?” Languidly he readjusted the inevitable monocle to his eye. “Like a whore,” he blandly ventured. “First, I did it for my own pleasure. Then I did it for the pleasure of my friends. And now — I do it for money.”
Misattributed
„As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.“
— Virginia Woolf, book Three Guineas
Source: Three Guineas (1938), Ch. 3, p. 109
Context: The outsider will say, "in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world." And if, when reason has said its say, still some obstinate emotion remains, some love of England dropped into a child's ears by the cawing of rooks in an elm tree, by the splash of waves on a beach, or by English voices murmuring nursery rhymes, this drop of pure, if irrational, emotion she will make serve her to give to England first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world.
„One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.“
— Virginia Woolf, book A Room of One's Own
Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 1, p. 18
Context: The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
