If we all would think the same, how boring it would be, horrible. That’s why we like the differences, not in the most utter forms while gently and respectfully. In this post, we are going to list top 50 Virginia Woolf quotes, and gonna tell a little bit about her.
Who was Virginia Woolf? And Intriguing Virginia Woolf top 50 quotes.
It most often comes that most of the writers are troubled inside their head and heart with wars and battles going on, of which they don’t know why they are there in their life or if, how they have come. And yes, it is true thoughts really and certainly change life. Virginia Woolf was born on 25th January 1882. Her full name was Adeline Virginia Stephen. If we talk about and ask who was considered the most important 20th century modernist author. It is Virginia Woolf, one of the main. She was an English writer. Most of the women writers were home schooled while their brothers went to school. Woolf with her sisters also got homeschooled and taught Victorian literature and English classics.
Green nature, flowers, aloneness, and a home, which is your only retreat where you return and brood over what life is. And not coming to any conclusion and finding its answers by writing, is perhaps all writers have done. Woolf’s summer house at St Ives, Cornwall was an early and important influence for her writing. In everyone’s life childhood is a period of everlasting experience whether it goes good or a little off-line. It always affects our young life or perhaps forever, and we can never forget it. On the basis of what happened in our childhood, it can change our life journey. And it same happened with Virginia Woolf. When her mother died and her half-sister. These two tragic events left unerasable imprint on her that affected her greatly. Woolf attended King’s college too where she studied classics including history. Woolf was not that kind of a woman who only remained in herself, while a kind of activist or reforming type of lady who believed in improving women’s condition at that time. During her college time she got to meet a few reformers who believed in women’s higher education and in their equal rights. Her oxford graduate brothers also influenced her in many ways as well as she could read many books as she wanted to, that sharpened her knowledge and made it broad. Her father had a vast library. Her father also died that was another great sudden shock in her life. He was the person who encouraged her to write professionally. Much of the Woolf work got published through her husband press, which they founded. Virginia married Leonard Woolf. I don’t understand that why writers are troubled most by their mentality. Woolf too due to her mental problems troubled. It is often speculated that she could have bipolar disorder, which was not curable at that time or perhaps not known. As Hemingway did suicide so as Woolf too. She drowned herself in the river Ouse at Lewes by putting rocks in her pockets. She was 59 when she died on 28th March 1941. So what do you think of reading a brief about her. How interesting she as a writer is? Don’t you want to know? We think we have given you enough intrigue and interest. Here are all the top 50 Virginia Woolf quotes. Don’t forget to share and comment.
Top 50 Virginia Woolf Quotes
Virginia Woolf Quotes on Life & Love
“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
“Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.”
“Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.”
“Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.”
“One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.”
“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”
“It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.”
“To enjoy the freedom we have to control ourselves.”
“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.”
“Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.”
“It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”
“The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.”
“We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.”
“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
“Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.”
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well if one has not dined well.”
“Language is wine upon the lips.”
“Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.”
“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.”
“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 Feminism Quotes
“It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.”
“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.”
“The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like its completeness. I like their anonymity.”
“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
“Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?”
“As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”
“Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”
“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”
“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
“They can because they think they can. ”
Virginia Woolf Quotes on Writing
“I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.”
“Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry. ”
“Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.”
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
“Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.”
“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written largely in his works.”
“Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.”
“A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it’s there complete in the mind, if only at the back.”
“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
“I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again – as I always am when I write.”
“The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.”
“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
“This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether if I knew what I meant.”
“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.”
“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.”
Various Others Virginia Woolf Quotes
It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
If you do not tell the truth about yourself. you cannot tell it about other people.
Never pretend that the things you haven’t got are not worth having.
No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
Interesting Things About Virginia Woolf
- National Portrait Gallery has sold a great number of Virginia Woolf post card.
- Nichole Kidman won 2003 Academy Award for portraying Virginia Woolf in a movie named ‘Hours’.
- Much of Virginia Woolf’s work is influenced by her mother’s death. She loved her much. Her death was great loss to her.
- Woolf suffered sexual abuse by her half-brothers during her childhood as stated by her biographer Gillian Gill.
- Woolf is said to be a Jewish hater. Her short story ‘The Duchess and The Jeweller is considered anti-Semitic. She also detested poor and low class people.
- Virginia Woolf was an atheist. She was said to be a humanist. Her entire family was non-religious. Though she was a proponent of feminism.
- Woolf believed in transcendentalism and mysticism that affected her writing and her life too. She was also immensely influenced by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev and Henry David Thoreau.
- Woolf taught at Morley College and said her students to write essays on themselves.
- In her very early age, she got taught by her mother Latin, French and History.
- Woolf tried to kill herself multiple times. Once she tried to kill herself by jumping from a window but could not die because the window was not at enough height.
- She often said she heard voices. It is said that once during a summer she got mad believing birds were chirping in Greek and Kind Edward seventh saying curses.
- Though perhaps she had described every experience. But she said once that she would be able to describe her death experience.
- Virginia first wrote professionally for Times Literary Supplement.
- Her most notable works are Mrs Dalloway, The Wavers, A Room of One’s Own, Orlando, To The Lighthouse. Besides all these, she had published many short stories, non-fiction work, autobiography works and essays.
- During her childhood, she was not able to speak in coherent sentences.
- Woolf was nicknamed ‘The Goat’ when she was in the nursery.
- Woolf took pleasure in writing words on paper with different pens unless she found a pen that would give her a perfect sensation.
- Woolf never like anyone taking her photograph. She hated it most.
- Woolf was afraid of sex.
- Woolf never believed in war and violence. She was a pacifist.
- Woolf used to listen to Beethoven’s late quartets.
So how do you like all these interesting things about Virginia Woolf? You can tell us in the comment section below. She was a kind of mysterious and trouble writer, who lost all her dears in her young age. Like many other writers, she also attempted to kill herself and at the end did it. These kinds of things as we have written about other writers too make them often mysterious persons. Writes are vast like oceans. You don’t know what is storming their mind or crippling them. Though whatever the troubles they go through. But they have the power or a gift given God to write, which we think is rare. We think everything is writing and we expect that you would like her quotes and interesting things about her. And yes, never forget to share and post top 50 Virginia Woolf quotes.