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
sunshine fog weather
The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; My thoughts follow the exact same process.
choices living-my-life
It's my choice, to choose how to live my life.
chaos longing
Only longing can fill with more of itself.
sea genius dripping
The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.
success sight people
If people are highly successful in their profession they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion.
writing way wells
The way to write well is to live intensely.
wine water literature
There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.... the essay must be pure--pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.
writing thinking essentials
[Final diary entry:] Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that it's seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.
home house lunatic-asylums
Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.
soup ducklings novelists
It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance...
letters puppy bones
I was so pleased and excited by your letter that I trotted about all day like a puppy with a bone.
opposites differences judging
The comparison between Coleridge and Johnson is obvious in so far as each held sway chiefly by the power of his tongue. The difference between their methods is so marked that it is tempting, but also unnecessary, to judge one to be inferior to the other. Johnson was robust, combative, and concrete; Coleridge was the opposite. The contrast was perhaps in his mind when he said of Johnson: "his bow-wow manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced.
sex thinking fiction
It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of woman's life is that ...
flower
Until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself.