Virginia Woolf, a prominent English author and pioneer of the modernist literary movement, has left a profound impact on literature and feminist thought.
Known for her works like “Mrs. Dalloway” and “To the Lighthouse,” she revolutionized narrative form and championed the exploration of consciousness. Her contributions challenge us to question societal norms and encourage introspection, making her an enduringly significant figure in our daily lives.
1. “It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.” – Virginia Woolf
2. “Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.” – Virginia Woolf
3. “This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.” – Virginia Woolf
4. “The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.” – Virginia Woolf
5. “I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again – as I always am when I write.” – Virginia Woolf
6. “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
7. “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
8. “Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?” – Virginia Woolf
9. “It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.” – Virginia Woolf
10. “Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.” – Virginia Woolf
11. “The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.” – Virginia Woolf
12. “The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.” – Virginia Woolf
13. “Language is wine upon the lips.” – Virginia Woolf
14. “Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.” – Virginia Woolf
15. “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.” – Virginia Woolf
16. “You send a boy to school in order to make friends – the right sort.” – Virginia Woolf
17. “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” – Virginia Woolf
18. “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” – Virginia Woolf
19. “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
20. “Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?” – Virginia Woolf
21. “The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.” – Virginia Woolf
22. “It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.” – Virginia Woolf
23. “The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.” – Virginia Woolf
24. “On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.” – Virginia Woolf
25. “Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.” – Virginia Woolf
26. “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
27. “One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.” – Virginia Woolf
28. “As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” – Virginia Woolf
29. “If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.” – Virginia Woolf
30. “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.” – Virginia Woolf
31. “That great Cathedral space which was childhood.” – Virginia Woolf
32. “I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it.” – Virginia Woolf
33. “Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.” – Virginia Woolf
34. “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
35. “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
36. “Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?” – Virginia Woolf
37. “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
38. “The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.” – Virginia Woolf
39. “For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?” – Virginia Woolf
40. “It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.” – Virginia Woolf
41. “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
42. “One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.” – Virginia Woolf
43. “I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it.” – Virginia Woolf
44. “Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.” – Virginia Woolf
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