Quote

The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent...there must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.

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
Artist
Prodigious
Order
Freeing
Matter
Obstacle
Whole
Obstacles
Must
Foreign
Work
Entire
Mind
Achieve
Effort
Incandescent

More quotes by Virginia Woolf

Image
People ask me why I write. I write to find out what I know.
Virginia Woolf
Image
I was lying in bed this morning and saying to myself, 'the remarkable thing about Ethel is her stupendous self-satisfaction' when in came your letter to confirm this profound psychological observation. How delighted I was!
Virginia Woolf
Image
Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?
Virginia Woolf
Image
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
Image
I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.
Virginia Woolf
Image
I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross: that it's to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Wine has a drastic, an astringent taste. I cannot help wincing as I drink. Ascent of flowers, radiance and heat, are distilled here to a fiery, yellow liquid. Just behind my shoulder-blades some dry thing, wide-eyed, gently closes, gradually lulls itself to sleep. This is rapture. This is relief.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play.
Virginia Woolf
Image
What could be more serious than the love of man for woman, what more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death at the same time these lovers, these people entering into illusion glittering eyed, must be danced round with mockery, decorated with garlands.
Virginia Woolf
Image
I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.
Virginia Woolf
Image
With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes -- one of the tragedies of married life.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Nothing is stronger than the position of the dead among the living.
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
Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Ruin, weariness, death, perpetually death, stand grimly to confront the other presence of Elizabethan drama which is life: life compact of frigates, fir trees and ivory, of dolphins and the juice of July flowers, of the milk of unicorns and panthers’ breath, of ropes of pearl, brains of peacocks and Cretan wine.
Virginia Woolf
Image
For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Life without illusion is a ghostly affair.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Like and like and like--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?
Virginia Woolf