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Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Quotes

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Famous Virginia Woolf Quotes

“An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know. All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was!-that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant . . .”

WomenSubjectivityInteriority
Book:Mrs. Dalloway
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“And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally this is so. Yet is it the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are "important"; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes "trivial." And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. 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.”

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Book:A Room of One’s Own
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“Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty, so that all one’s perceptions, half-way to truth, were tangled in a golden mesh? Or did she lock up within her some secret which certainly Lily Briscoe believed people must have for the world to go on at all? Every one could not be as helter skelter, hand to mouth as she was. But if they knew, could they tell one what they knew? Sitting on the floor with her arms round Mrs. Ramsay’s knees, close as she could get, smiling to think that Mrs. Ramsay would never know the reason of that pressure, she imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was, physically, touching her, were stood, like the treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out, would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly, never made public. What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers? What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored? Could the body achieve, or the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passages of the brain? or the heart? Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay’s knee.”

LoveWomenKnowledgeIntimacyAdoration
Book:To the Lighthouse
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“Shakespeare's sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.”

WomenPoetry LifeVirginia Woolf
Book:Virginia Woolf - A Room of One’s Own
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“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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“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 as we are, 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.”

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Book:A Room of One’s Own
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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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“Suprimid esta protección, someted a las mujeres a las mismas actividades y esfuerzos que los hombres, haced de ellas soldados, marinos, maquinistas y repartidores y ¿acaso las mujeres no morirán mucho más jóvenes, mucho antes que los hombres y uno dirá: «Hoy he visto a una mujer», como antes solía decir: «Hoy he visto un aeroplano»? No se sabe lo que ocurrirá cuando el ser mujer ya no sea una ocupación protegida, pensé abriendo la puerta.”

WomenEmpowermentWomanEmpowering QuotesKnowledge Education
Book:Un cuarto propio
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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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“I see it all. I feel it all. I am inspired. My eyes fill with tears. Yet even as I feel this. I lash my frenzy higher and higher. It foams. It becomes artificial, insincere. Words and words and words, how they gallop - how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot fly with them, scattering women and string bags. There is some flaw in me - some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity”

WritingLiteratureWomenNovelNarrativeDescriptiveMonologue
Book:The Waves
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“[...] como o romance tem essa correspondência com a vida real, seus valores são, numa certa medida, os da vida real. Mas é óbvio que os valores das mulheres diferem, com frequência, dos que foram feitos pelo outro sexo; isso acontece, naturalmente. E, no entanto, são os valores masculinos que prevalecem. Falando cruamente, o futebol e o esporte são "importantes"; o culto da moda e a compra de roupas são "insignificantes". E esses valores são inevitavelmente transferidos da vida para a ficção. Esse é um livro importante, pressupõe o crítico, porque lida com a guerra. Esse é um livro insignificante, pois lida com os sentimentos das mulheres numa sala de visitas.”

WomenNovelVirginia Woolf
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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“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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“However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer afternoon. But what do they do then? and there came to my mind’s eye one of those long streets somewhere south of the river whose infinite rows are innumerably populated. With the eye of the imagination I saw a very ancient lady crossing the street on the arm of a middle-aged woman, her daughter, perhaps, both so respectably booted and furred that their dressing in the afternoon must be a ritual, and the clothes themselves put away in cupboards with camphor, year after year, throughout the summer months. They cross the road when the lamps are being lit (for the dusk is their favourite hour), as they must have done year after year. The elder is close on eighty; but if one asked her what her life has meant to her, she would say that she remembered the streets lit for the battle of Balaclava, or had heard the guns fire in Hyde Park for the birth of King Edward the Seventh. And if one asked her, longing to pin down the moment with date and season, but what were you doing on the fifth of April 1868, or the second of November 1875, she would look vague and say that she could remember nothing. For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie. All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded, I said, addressing Mary Carmichael as if she were present; and went on in thought through the streets of London feeling in imagination the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners with their arms akimbo, and the rings embedded in their fat swollen fingers, talking with a gesticulation like the swing of Shakespeare’s words; or from the violet-sellers and match-sellers and old crones stationed under doorways; or from drifting girls whose faces, like waves in sun and cloud, signal the coming of men and women and the flickering lights of shop windows. All that you will have to explore, I said to Mary Carmichael, holding your torch firm in your hand.”

WritingWomenVirginia Woolf
Book:A Room of One’s Own
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“Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.”

InspirationalWritingWomenIntellectual Freedom
Book:A Room of One’s Own
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“As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”

WorldInspirationalCountryWholeInspirationWomenSuccessfulDiversityIndependentFeministWhole WorldBrotherhoodStrong WomenBeautiful WomenBeing A WomanUnity In DiversitySuccessful WomenInspirational Strong WomenWomen PowerInternational Women's DayWomen EqualityI Am WomanInternational Women DayWomans DayInspirational FeministFamous Women InspirationalMrs DallowayAmbitious WomenProud Woman
Author:Virginia Woolf
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“A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.”

KnowsWellsMeanBodyRunningUnderstandingWomenOpinionDrinkJudgmentDignityCriticismPraiseRefuseWitAdmireTeaPensDeniedRespect Her
Book:Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
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“If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man; some think even greater.”

IfsThinkingMenMeanPersonsBeautifulWomenExistenceFictionGreaterImagineWrittenImportanceVariousExtremesHeroicSplendidHideous
Book:Selected Works of Virginia Woolf
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