Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf, known professionally as Virginia Woolf, was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 January 1882
CityLondon, England
fighting bird rifles
scarcely a human being in the course of history has fallen to a woman's rifle; the vast majority of birds and beasts have been killed by you, not by us. Obviously there is for you some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting which we have never felt or enjoyed.
ocean sea sky
The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it.
purses bitterness slipping
Indeed, I thought, slipping the silver into my purse, it is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about.
writing lava madness
As an experience, madness is terrific ... and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.
people house independence
in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house ...
wall writing thinking
I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.
poet contemporary
The poet is always our contemporary.
reading air doors
reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once - hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head - all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response) ...
truth light giving
For there is a virtue in truth; it has an almost mystic power. Like radium, it seems to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms of light.
brain phrases mercy
travelers are much at the mercy of phrases ... vast generalizations formulate in their exposed brains ...
theory dangerous dangerous-things
Theories then are dangerous things.
ghost-stories feelings our-love
How are we to account for the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid which is so much involved in our love of ghost stories?
sleep people want
Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?
christian garden bells
You would get longer livelier and more frequent letters from me, if it weren't for the Christian religion. How that bell tolling at the end of the garden, dum dum, dum dum, annoys me! Why is Christianity so insistent and so sad?