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
pain eye squares
Am I alone in my egotism when I say that never does the pale light of dawn filter through the blinds of 52 Tavistock Square but I open my eyes and exclaim, "Good God! Here I am again!" not always with pleasure, often with pain; sometimes in a spasm.
silence silent
One must learn to be silent just as one must learn to talk.
art real world
Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough.
writing profound pleasure
writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.
blessed rivers childhood
O how blessed it would be never to marry, or grow old; but to spend one's life innocently and indifferently among the trees and rivers which alone can keep one cool and childlike in the midst of the troubles of the world!
hero men thinking
It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?... What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.
happiness men world
To be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.
self literature may
A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.
spirit divine mouthpiece
We shall be the mouthpieces of the divine spirit—
women army blessing
Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays by Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?
thinking arguing argument
When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument.
water ingredients lectures
You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures.
life bones
Life's bare as a bone.
lying reality men
Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees ... one's happiness, one's reality?