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Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Quotes

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Famous Virginia Woolf Quotes

“There is a code of behavior, she knew, whose seventh article (it may be) says that on occasions of this sort it behooves the woman, whatever her own occupation may be, to go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs, of his vanity, of his urgent desire to assert himself; as indeed it is their duty, she reflected, in her old maidenly fairness, to help us, suppose the Tube were to burst into flames. Then, she thought, I should certainly expect Mr. Tansley to get me out. But how would it be, she thought, if neither of us did either of these things? So she sat there smiling.”

MenWomenFeminismBehaviorVanityFairness
Book:To the Lighthouse
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“I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee's life of the poet. She died young--alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.”

PoetryWomenFictionDreamsFeminismEmpowermentDignityEqualityGenderOpportunitiesSelf DeterminationAspirationsSocial NormsWomen Writers
Book:A Room of One’s Own
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“Pero casi sin excepción se describe a la mujer desde el punto de vista de su relación con hombres. Era extraño que, hasta Jane Austen, todos los personajes femeninos importantes de la literatura no sólo hubieran sido vistos exclusivamente por el otro sexo, sino desde el punto de vista de su relación con el otro sexo. Y ésta es una parte tan pequeña de la vida de una mujer… Y qué poco puede un hombre saber siquiera de esto observándolo a través de las gafas negras o rosadas que la sexualidad le coloca sobre la nariz.”

LiteratureWomenFeminismEmpowermentWomen Empowerment
Book:Un cuarto propio
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“Here is nature once more at her old game of self-preservation. This train of thought, she perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision with reality, for who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker’s Table of Precedency? The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor; the Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York. Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and the great thing is to know who follows whom. Whitaker knows, and let that, so Nature counsels, comfort you, instead of enraging you; and if you can’t be comforted, if you must shatter this hour of peace, think of the mark on the wall.   11 I understand Nature’s game—her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action—men, we assume, who don’t think. Still, there’s no harm in putting a full stop to one’s disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.”

FeminismThe Mark On The Wall
Book:Monday or Tuesday
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“...щойно хвороба читання вражає організм, вона ослаблює його так, що він стає легкою здобиччю іншого лиха, яке зачаїлося в чорнильниці та роз'їдає перо. Нещасний береться писати. *** - О Господи! - знову вигукнула вога на завершення своїх міркувань, - то що ж мені, зважати на думку протилежної статі, хоч би якою жахливою вона здавалася? *** Вона пригадала, як у подобі молодого чоловіка вимагала, щоб жінки були слухняні, цнотливі, з приємним запахом, у вишуканому вбранні. "Тепер мені доведеться самій заплатити таку ціну, - міркувала вона, - бо за своєю натурою жінки (з огляду на мій невеличкий досвід перебування в їхній статі) зовсім не є слухняними, цнотливими, пахучими й гарно вбраними. І яка дисципліна потрібна для виховання цих чеснот, без яких вони не зможуть насолоджуватися жодними принадами життя! *** І я ніколи не зможу влупити чоловіку по голові чи сказати просто у вічі, що він бреше, або вихоипити меча і проштрикнути його, або засідати серед рівних, носити герцогську корону, виступати під час процесу, винести комусь смертельий вирок, повести за собою армію, прогарцювати Вайтголлом на коні чи начепити на груди сімдесят дві медалі. Все, що я зможу, щойно ступлю на англійську землю, - розливати чай і запитувати в моїх лордів, який саме вони люблять. *** ... забороняти жінкам навчатися, щоб вони не могли посміятися з тебе; бути рабом якогось дівчиська у спідницях і походжати так, ніби ти володар світу... Боже, якиї дуреп вони з нас роблять і які ж ми насправді дурні! *** Те, що тиша глибшає після шуму, потребує наукового доведення. Але те, що самотність стає більш очевидною відразу потому, як вас любили, підтвердить багато жінок. *** Вона почала трішки більше сумніватися в своєму розумі, як і належить жінці, й трішки більше почала пишатися своєю зовнішністю, як це властіве жінкам. *** У чоловіка рука вільна, щоб він міг будь-якої миті вихопити меч, а жінка змушена притримувати рукою атлас сукні на плечі. Чоловік дивиться у світ прямо, ніби той викроєний для його потреб і пошитий відповідно до його вподобань. Жінка кидає обережний спідлоба, делікатно і ніби з підозрою. Якби вони носили те саме вбрання, можливо, й погляд у них був би однаковий. *** Кожна людина переживає коливання від однієї статі до іншої, і часто лише одяг стоїть на сторожі чоловічої або жіночої подоби, тим часом як під ним ховається зовсім інша стать, невидима ззовні. *** ...ілюзії розбиваються від зіткнення з реальністю, тож там, де панує ілюзія, немає місця справжньому щастю, справжній дотепності чи справжній глибині.”

FeminismIdentity
Book:Orlando
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“He would open the door of the drawing-room or the nursery, I thought, and find her among her children perhaps, or with a piece of embroidery on her knee at any rate, the center of some different order in the system of life, and the contrast between this world and his own, which might be the law courts or the House of Commons, would at once refresh and invigorate; and there would follow, even in the simplest talk, such a natural difference of opinion that the dried ideas in him would be fertilized anew; and the sight of her creating in a different medium from his own would so quicken his creative power that insensibly his sterile mind would begin to plot again, and he would find the phrase or the scene which was lacking when he put on his hat to visit her.”

InspirationalFeminismEqualityGender Equality
Book:A Room of One’s Own
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“Así queda en parte explicado que a menudo las mujeres sean imprescindibles a los hombres. Y también así se entiende mejor por qué a los hombres les intranquilizan tanto las críticas de las mujeres; por qué las mujeres no les pueden decir este libro es malo, este cuadro es flojo o lo que sea sin causar mucho más dolor y provocar mucha más cólera de los que causaría y provocaría un hombre que hiciera la misma crítica. Porque si ellas se ponen a decir la verdad, la imagen del espejo se encoge; la robustez del hombre ante la vida disminuye. ¿Cómo va a emitir juicios, civilizar indígenas, hacer leyes, escribir libros, vestirse de etiqueta y hacer discursos en los banquetes si a la hora del desayuno y de la cena no puede verse a sí mismo por lo menos de tamaño doble de lo que es?”

FeminismSelf WorthFree Will
Book:Un cuarto propio
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“My belief is that if we live another century or so — I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals — and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton's bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.”

HopeFeminismVirginia WoolfShakespeare S Sister
Book:A Room of One’s Own
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“And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. (...) almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. (...) [women in fiction were] not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that”

WomenFeminismRepresentationPatriarchyFemale FriendshipFemale BondingWomen Being Friends
Book:A Room of One’s Own
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“Life for both sexes - and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement - is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority - it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney - for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination - over other people.”

FeminismFeministSexismWomen WritersMysogynyWomen AuthorsBloomsburyVirigina Woolf
Author:Virginia Woolf
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“Here she tossed her foot impatiently, and showed an inch or two of calf. A sailor on the mast, who happened to look down at the moment, started so violently that he missed his footing and only saved himself by the skin of his teeth. 'If the sight of my ankles means death to an honest fellow who, no doubt, has a wife and family to support, I must, in all humanity, keep them covered,' Orlando thought. Yet her legs were among her chieftest beauties. And she fell to thinking what an odd pass we have come to when all a woman's beauty has to be kept covered lest a sailor fall from a mast-head. 'A pox on them!' she said, realizing for the first time what, in other circumstances, she would have been taught as a child, that is to say, the sacred responsibilities of womanhood...”

HumorQuotesFeminismVirginia WoolfOrlando
Book:Orlando
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“She remembered how, as a young man, she had insisted that women must be obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled. "Now I shall have to pay in my own person for those desires," she reflected; "for women are not (judging by my own short experience of the sex) obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled by nature. They can only attain these graces, without which they may enjoy none of the delights of life, by the most tedious discipline. There's the hairdressing," she thought, "that alone will take an hour of my morning, there's looking in the looking-glass, another hour; there's staying and lacing; there's washing and powdering; there's changing from silk to lace and from lace to paduasoy; there's being chaste year in and year out...”

HumorFeminismSexismOrlando
Book:Orlando
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“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

WritingWomenHistoryFeminismEmpowermentDignityGenderMisogynyPersecutionWitchesSuppressionSocial NormsWomen WritersAnonymous Authorship
Book:A Room of One’s Own
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“Does it explain my astonishment the other day when Z, most humane, most modest of men, taking up some book by Rebecca West and reading a passage in it, exclaimed, 'The arrant feminist! She says that men are snobs!' The exclamation, to me so surprising - for why was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex? - was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself. 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.”

FeminismFeministVirginia WoolfWomen WritersWomen AuthorsBloomsbury
Author:Virginia Woolf
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