Virginia Woolf Quotes (1882-1941)

“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”

“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”

“Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.”

“Instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 & continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to the other.”

“Charlotte Brontë, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane Austen looked at it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it. Thus, with less genius for writing than Charlotte Brontë, she got infinitely more said.”

“For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it.”

“Instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 & continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to the other.”

“But what did Mr. Beerbohm give to the essay and what did he take from it? That is a much more complicated question, for here we have an essayist who has concentrated on the work and is without doubt the prince of his profession.”

“Certainly, the Barchester novels tell the truth, and the English truth, at first sight, is almost as plain of feature as the French truth, though with a difference. Mr. Slope is a hypocrite, with a "pawing, greasy way with him". Mrs. Proudie is a domineering bully. The Archdeacon is well-meaning but coarse-grained and thick-cut. Thanks to the vigour of the author, the world of which these are the most prominent inhabitants goes through its daily rigmarole of feeding and begetting children and worshipping with a thoroughness, a gusto, which leaves us no loophole of escape. We believe in Barchester as we believe in the reality of our own weekly bills.”

“Then there was Somerset Maugham, a grim figure; rat-eyed; dead man cheeked, unshaven; a criminal I should have said had I met him on a bus.”

“Shelley, both as son and as husband, fought for reason and freedom in private life, and his experiments, disastrous as they were in many ways, have helped us to greater sincerity and happiness in our own conflicts.”

“Of the modern writers, Virginia Woolf is one who consistently attempted to place women at the center of her thinking. But she did not do it with the bold and inclusive sweep of Sappho. She did it awkwardly and with apology, with a tone of self-deprecation. This is apparent, for example, in A Room of One's Own, in its style and tone and in its apparent random "female" ambience of thought hither and yon, an innovation to mask the real power of her intellect.”

“Writing is also a profession, and, at its best, an honourable one. It has been made honourable by those who have already been members of it. Whether you like it or not, every time you set pen to paper you’re staring at the same blank space that confronted Milton, Melville, Emily Bronte, Dostoevsky and George Eliot, George Orwell and William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams, not to mention the latest hero, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.”

“I am tired of hearing Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson held up as the matriarchs of feminist and/or women's literature. Woolf was a racist, Dickinson was a woman of privilege who never left her house, nor had to deal with issues beyond which white dress to wear on a given day. Race and class have yet to be addressed, or if they are discussed, it is on their terms not ours”

“I now think tragedy is not foul deeds done to a person (usually noble in some manner) but rather that tragedy is irresolvable conflict. Both sides/ideas are right. Plot involves fragmentary reality, and it might involve composite reality. Fragmentary reality is the view of the individual. Composite reality is the community or state view. Fragmentary reality is always set against composite reality. Virginia Woolf did this by creating fragmentary monologues and for a while this was all the rage in literature. She was a genius. In the hands of the merely talented it came off like gibberish.”

“I cannot say I am a citizen of the world as Virginia Woolf, speaking as an Anglo woman born to economic means, declared herself; nor can I make the same claim to U.S. citizenship as Adrienne Rich does despite her universal feeling for humanity. As a mestiza born to the lower strata, I am treated at best, as a second class citizen, at worst, as a non-entity. I am commonly perceived as a foreigner everywhere I go, including in the United States and in Mexico. This international perception is based on my color and features. I am neither black nor white. I am not light skinned and cannot be mistaken for "white"; because my hair is so straight I cannot be mistaken for "black." And by U.S..standards and according to some North American Native Americans, I cannot make official claims to being india.”

“Not surprisingly, a valorization of the body has been present in nearly all the literature of "second wave" 20th-century feminism, as it has characterized the literature produced by the anti-colonial revolt and by the descendants of the enslaved Africans. On this ground, across great geographic and cultural boundaries, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) anticipates Aimé Cesaire's Return to the Native Land (1938), when she mockingly scolds her female audience and, behind it, a broader female world, for not having managed to produce anything but children.”

“[S]ome economic awareness may even be a prerequisite to the full appreciation of [some] books, plays, and operas. Virginia Woolf's Orlando must be quite bewildering to the economically ignorant.”

“Her genius was intensely feminine and personal—private almost. To read one of her books was (if you liked it) to receive a letter from her, addressed specially to you.”

“...on race, as on so much else, Virginia was not a typical white European feminist, but stood against much of what that sector of women has come to stand for. Virginia Woolf wanted the military budget for women. She made the case for middle-class women. She said it should come to women as wages for the housework we did; that that was a better way to spend the money. I can't see an argument against it. In Three Guineas, the only extensive nonfiction book she ever wrote, she made this central. But the case she makes for wages for housework, spelled out most brilliantly in this extraordinary book, seems not to interest - may even be censored out by - her admirers...I think Virginia can be tremendously useful to us, to all of us, women of color, Third World women, white women, and men on our side, because she gives us the strength to demand more of what we're entitled to. And the strength also to refuse to replicate or allow other women to replicate what we have been attacking men for doing and being.”

“Nothing is more destructive of the spirit and ultimately of creativity than false meekness, anger that does not know its own name. And nothing is more freeing for a woman (or for a woman writer) than giving up the pleasures of masochism and beginning to fight. But we must always remember that fighting is only a first step. As Virginia Woolf points out in A Room of One's Own, many women's books have been destroyed by the rage and bitterness at their own centers. Rage opens the doors into the spirit, but then the spirit must be nurtureed.”

“How begin to describe the permission Woolf’s feminism and artistry bestowed on the hopeful beginner? For me, her work, which never panders, was a reliable antidote to literary men’s scorn or disregard. Her novels demonstrated that despised domesticity, including dinner parties and shopping, could be transformed into unrivaled art.”