Who is Virginia Woolf?
Virginia Woolf is an English poet, novelist, essayist, and writer. We also can say her a deep thinker. If we make a list of some most influenced modern writers of English Literature then Virginia Woolf will be at the top of the list. She is considered an important modern English poet because of her modernist theme and style.
The most important feature of the modern novel was a stream of consciousness type narration. Some memorable works of Virginia Woolf are “Mrs. Dalloway”, “To the Lighthouse”, “Orlando A Biography”, etc. As she was a deep thinker, her thinking was human feelings and female psychology. Virginia Woolf has a huge number of quotes. Virginia Woolf quotes are very realistic. People can follow these quotes to be benefited.
Top 50 Virginia Woolf Quotes:
1. If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. —Virginia Woolf
2. Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.—Virginia Woolf
3. Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. —Virginia Woolf
4. As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world. —Virginia Woolf
5. For most of history, Anonymous was a woman. —Virginia Woolf
6. The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself. —Virginia Woolf
7. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. —Virginia Woolf
8. My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for? —Virginia Woolf
9. You cannot find peace by avoiding life. —Virginia Woolf
10. 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. —Virginia Woolf
11. Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women? —Virginia Woolf
12. I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.—Virginia Woolf
13. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. —Virginia Woolf
14. To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves. —Virginia Woolf
15. I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. —Virginia Woolf
16. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. —Virginia Woolf
17. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly. —Virginia Woolf
18. I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. —Virginia Woolf
19. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. —Virginia Woolf
20. There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.—Virginia Woolf
21. The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity. —Virginia Woolf
22. Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.—Virginia Woolf
23. Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth. —Virginia Woolf
24. The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind. —Virginia Woolf
25. Language is wine upon the lips. —Virginia Woolf
26. Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible. —Virginia Woolf
27. Arrange whatever pieces come your way. —Virginia Woolf
28. The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. —Virginia Woolf
29. Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded. —Virginia Woolf
30. Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title. —Virginia Woolf
31. The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. —Virginia Woolf
32. These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism. —Virginia Woolf
33. Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. —Virginia Woolf
34. Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent. —Virginia Woolf
35. Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life. —Virginia Woolf
36. Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice. —Virginia Woolf
37. The older one grows, the more one likes indecency. —Virginia Woolf
38. It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality. —Virginia Woolf
39. The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent, and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. —Virginia Woolf
40. It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. —Virginia Woolf
41. Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order. —Virginia Woolf
42. If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? – not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers? —Virginia Woolf
43. This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say. —Virginia Woolf
44. One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph. —Virginia Woolf
45. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame. —Virginia Woolf
46. A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. —Virginia Woolf
47. I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it. —Virginia Woolf
48. On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points. —Virginia Woolf
49. There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea. —Virginia Woolf
50. A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out. —Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf Biography :
The biography gives a brief description of a person’s life. The biography of Virginia Woolf is important if you want to know about her. So, let’s discuss Virginia Woolf’s biography in short.
Virginia Woolf Early Life
Virginia Woolf was born on 25 February 1882. Her birthplace is South Kensington, London, England. The early life of Virginia Woolf was arranged by the regular loss of her family members. In 1895 she lost her mother. After two years of that Virginia Woolf’s mother like sister Stella Duckworth, died.
Her father died in 1904. All these deaths made her very grave in nature. These incidents changed the theme. Virginia Woolf’s living place also changed at different times in her childhood.
Virginia Woolf Education
The education for girls of that time was not much accepted. Boys are allowed to study at college but girls are mainly taught at home. Virginia Woolf also got the same types of education in her childhood. She studied Victorian literature and classic English at her home.
Later Virginia Woolf attended King’s College London, to continue her further education on literature and history. Her educated brother also helped her to know many things on different topics.
Virginia Woolf Career:
The writing career of Virginia Woolf was inspired by her father. He showed her the way to become a writer. Her writing theme was mostly female psychology and this was developed after the 2nd world war. One of the main contributions of Virginia Woolf was the Stream of consciousness. This narrative device changed the history of modern novels. Her poems are also famous to different classes of people of society.
Why should we follow Virginia Woolf?
Virginia Woolf is a special writer with some special philosophy. She loves loneliness and depression. She is a melancholic personality. We find all her characteristic features in her writings.
These are not so good qualities of a person to follow. But she can be followed for her calm nature and her love for femininity. These good qualities make her more famous to follow. Virginia Woolf quotes are very deep in meaning. These quotes are effective in people’s life. Any person can follow Virginia Woolf for her quotes.
The literary works, quotes, and other characteristic features of Virginia Woolf are very famous among her followers. Her writing has some specialty and also her quotes. These quotes are the result of her deep thoughts. Virginia Woolf quotes can be effective for people.