Adeline Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English writer, and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando, and the book-length essay A Room of One’s Own, with its famous dictum, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Woolf suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life, thought to have been the result of what is now termed bipolar disorder and committed suicide by drowning in 1941 at the age of 59.
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The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
—Virginia Woolf
When a subject is highly controversial… one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Audiences
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
—Virginia Woolf
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
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Order
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 of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.
—Virginia Woolf
The mind is the most capricious of insects – flitting, fluttering.
—Virginia Woolf
Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure.
—Virginia Woolf
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