Quote

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.

Virginia Woolf

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Virginia Woolf
Age: 59 †
Born: 1882
Born: January 25
Died: 1941
Died: March 28
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Feminist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Publisher
Short Story Writer
Writer
London
England
Virxhinia Ulf
Virginia yo juanito Adeline Woolf
Virg̔inyah Vold
Virdžiniâ Vulf
Virdzhiniia Vulf
Virzhinia Ulf
Virginia Stephen
Virzhin︠iia Ulf
Adeline Virginia Stephen
Virginyah Volf
Adeline Virginia Woolf
Virginia Adeline Woolf
Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf
Birtzinia Gulph
Virginia Stephen Woolf
Woolf
Virginia
1882-1941
Literature
Essays
Must
Curtains
Writing
Round
Good
Rounds
Permanent
Draw
Shuts
Draws
Essay
Quality
Curtain

More quotes by Virginia Woolf

Image
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
Virginia Woolf
Image
He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds-that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things.
Virginia Woolf
Image
All the months are crude experiments, out of which the perfect September is made.
Virginia Woolf
Image
There is a coherence in things, a stability something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.
Virginia Woolf
Image
It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Why does one write these books after all? The drudgery, the misery, the grind, are forgotten everytime and one launches another, and it seems sheer joy and buoyancy.
Virginia Woolf
Image
I attain a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the mind's passage through the world, achieve in the end some kind of whole made of shivering fragments.
Virginia Woolf
Image
and then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in their heart.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.
Virginia Woolf
Image
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.
Virginia Woolf
Image
I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Am I alone in my egotism when I say that never does the pale light of dawn filter through the blinds of 52 Tavistock Square but I open my eyes and exclaim, Good God! Here I am again! not always with pleasure, often with pain sometimes in a spasm.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Some people go to priests others to poetry I to my friends.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Women alone stir my imagination.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth deforms the mind fetters the will.
Virginia Woolf
Image
The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.
Virginia Woolf
Image
So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.
Virginia Woolf
Image
to write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.
Virginia Woolf
Image
I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.
Virginia Woolf
Image
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