Quote

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.... the essay must be pure--pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.

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
Room
Extraneous
Rooms
Impurity
Literature
Deposits
Water
Dullness
Matter
Essay
Must
Essays
Like
Wine
Deadness
Pure
Impurities

More quotes by Virginia Woolf

Image
Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost. Life would split asunder without them. 'Come to tea, come to dinner, what's the truth of the story? have you heard the news? life in the capital is wonderful the Russian dancers....' These are our stays and props. These lace our days together and make of life a perfect globe.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves but to make people think this or that perfect idiocy she knew for no one was ever for a second taken in.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
Virginia Woolf
Image
To be silent to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.
Virginia Woolf
Image
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.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Indeed, I thought, slipping the silver into my purse, it is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about.
Virginia Woolf
Image
What a lark! What a plunge!
Virginia Woolf
Image
There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death.
Virginia Woolf
Image
For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.
Virginia Woolf
Image
This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Criticism? An artist wants praise. Praise.
Virginia Woolf
Image
How lovely goodness is in those who, stepping lightly, go smiling through the world.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.
Virginia Woolf
Image
It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.
Virginia Woolf
Image
But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Of the rest some we know to be dead though they walk among us some are not yet born though they go through the forms of life others are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six.
Virginia Woolf
Image
women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. ... Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own.
Virginia Woolf
Image
It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Life would split apart without letters.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
Virginia Woolf