Modernist writer of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, biographer and feminist who made significant contribution to the English literary club. She was a prolific writer whose modernist style changed with each book. She was an important 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’, each of which were highly successful and established her reputation as a contemporary writer. In addition to this, she came up with pioneering feminist work including ‘A Room of One's Own’ and ‘Three Guineas’. In both the works, she examined the difficulties that female writers and intellectuals faced because men held disproportionate legal and economic power. She also discussed about the future of women in education and society. Woolf wrote extensively on the problem of women’s access to the learned professions, such as academia, church, law, and medicine which only worsened with women’s exclusion from important universities such as Oxford and Cambridge. Woolf’s feminist viewpoint and perspective can also be seen in her quotes that portray her innate idealism and thought. In simple words, she has thrown light at important facts of life and touched varied topics. Go through this section and find out quotes by Virginia Woolf.
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.
Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.
Virginia Woolf
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.
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
Virginia Woolf
To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away...
She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.
Virginia Woolf
I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.
I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer?
To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
Virginia Woolf
It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
Virginia Woolf
I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore.
For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.
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?
Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.
What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was.
 as the complete indifference of other people. )
