About Virginia Woolf: Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century.
... All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I want to stretch my faculties on a book, to seek it in that happy age ... when the writer used both sides of his mind [the male and female si...
It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.
Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.
What is meant by 'reality'? It would seem something very erratic, very undependable-now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying...
Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past...
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.
The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.
And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.
Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.
The living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being.
Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some...
But china is seldom thrown from a great height; it is one of the rarest of human actions. You have to find in conjunction a very high house, and a woman of such reckless impulse and passionate prejudice that she flings her jar or pot straight from th...
The possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning so enormous and so various that to have only a moth's part in life, and a day moth's at that, appeared a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meagre opportunities to the full, pathetic. He flew vig...
Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts t...
The good citizen when he opens his door in the evening must be banker, golfer, husband, father; not a nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky, a debauchee in the slums of San Francisco, a soldier heading a revolution, a pariah howling...
For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him.
What she liked was simply life. "That's what i did it for," she said, speaking aloud to life... Could any man understand what she meant, either, about life? …But to go deeper, beneath what people said, and these judgments, how superficial, how frag...
Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sall...
