Woolf Quotes

• Virginia Woolf, I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her 'a beautiful little knitter.

  Edith Sitwell

  Beautiful, Writing, Virginia

  Of Virginia Woolf in a letter to Geoffrey Singleton, 11 July 1955: John Lehmann and Derek Palmer (eds.) 'Selected Letters' (1970)

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• When I saw Virginia Woolf, somewhere between the first and second acts, someone I had known as my mother became somebody else.

  Kiefer Sutherland

  Mother, Virginia, Saws

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• Virginia Woolf wrote, "Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword." On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where all is correct. But on the other side of that sword, if you're crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, "all is confusion." Nothing follows a regular course. Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will be more perilous.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Crazy, Lying, Fall

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims”, p.95, A&C Black

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• For pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space ; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects ; and sounds very remote and then very close ; flesh being gashed and blood sparting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.” — Virginia Woolf, The Waves

  Virginia Woolf

  Pain, Virginia, Blood

  Virginia Woolf (2005). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.763, Wordsworth Editions

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• Like all her friends, I miss her greatly...But...I am sure there is no case for lamentation...Virginia Woolf got through an immense amount of work, she gave acute pleasure in new ways, she pushed the light of the English language a little further against darkness. Those are facts.

  E. M. Forster

  Virginia, Light, Missing

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• I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels

  Rebecca Solnit

  Thinking, Squares, Virginia

  Rebecca Solnit (2008). “Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics”, p.288, Univ of California Press

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• A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool.

  Nick Hornby

  Suicide, Virginia, Orange

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• In the end I created a career of my own, concentrating on my writing and lecturing, reaching larger audiences than I would had I ended up with tenure and a full teaching load. It was Virginia Woolf who said that it is terrible to be frozen out of a sacred tradition - but even more terrible to be frozen into it.

  Michael Parenti

  Teaching, Writing, Careers

  "Dirty Truths". Book by Michael Parenti, 1996.

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• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

  Edward Albee

  Virginia

  Title of play (1962).

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• If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.

  Alan Bennett

  Sight, Virginia, Rose

  "Writing Home". Book by Alan Bennett, 1994.

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• I don't think there is a 'gay lifestyle.' I think that's superficial crap, all that talk about gay culture. A couple of restaurants on Castro Street and a couple of magazines do not constitute culture. Michelangelo is culture. Virginia Woolf is culture. So let's don't confuse our terms. Wearing earrings is not culture.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Couple, Gay, Thinking

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• Insofar as I think about postmodernism at all, and it doesn't exactly keep me awake at nights, I think of it as something that happens to one, not a style one affects. We're postmoderns because we're not modernists. The modernist writers—Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Woolf, Williams—spoke with a kind of vatic authority: they were really the last of the Romantics, for whom authorship itself was like being a solitary prophet in the wasteland.

  Jonathan Raban

  Night, Thinking, Style

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• Throughout much of history, women writers have capitulated to male standards, and have paid too much heed to what Virginia Woolf calls "the angel in the house." She is that little ghost who sits on one's shoulder while one writes and whispers, "Be nice, don't say anything that will embarrass the family, don't say anything your man will disapprove of ..." [ellipsis in original] The "angel in the house" castrates one's creativity because it deprives one of essential honesty, and many women writers have yet to win the freedom to be honest with themselves.

  Erica Jong

  Honesty, Nice, Writing

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• Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexual.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Bisexual, Virginia, Steps

  Rita Mae Brown (2011). “Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writers' Manual”, p.33, Bantam

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• Virginia Woolf came along in the early part of the century and essentially said through her writing, yes, big books can be written about the traditional big subjects. There is war. There is the search for God. These are all very important things.

  Michael Cunningham

  War, Book, Writing

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• I can't imagine otherwise - I guess Virginia Woolf could write wonderful novels where the women never have sex, and her novels work. But for me, I don't think I could write a plot without sex happening somewhere.

  Shirley Geok-lin Lim

  Sex, Writing, Thinking

  "Walking with Her Muse: An Interview with Shirley Geok-lin Lim". Contemporary Women's Writing, Volume 8, Issue 2, 1 July 2014, Pages 123 - 135, academic.oup.com. June 22, 2013.

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• Virginia Woolf was one example. She was called the "Lover of 100 Gangsters."

  Sergio Leone

  Virginia, Example, Lovers

  Source: www.americansuburbx.com

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• I was into Virginia Woolf and James Joyce [at university] and I think we all thought that [Charles] Dickens wasn't that cool.

  Felicity Jones

  Thinking, Virginia, Joyce

  Source: www.shockya.com

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• Philip Glass, like [Virginia] Woolf, is more interested in that which continues than he is in that which begins, climaxes, and ends... Glass and Woolf have both broken out of the traditional realm of the story, whether literary or musical, in favor of something more meditative, less neatly delineated, and more true to life. For me, Glass [finds] in three repeated notes something of [a] rapture of sameness.

  Michael Cunningham

  Glasses, Virginia, Broken

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Virginia Woolf thought a lot about her own sex when she wrote. In the best sense of the word, her writing is very feminine, and by that I mean that women are supposed to be very sensitive to all the sensations of nature, much more so than men, much more contemplative. It's this quality that marks her best works.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Sex, Writing, Mean

  Source: www.iaphitalia.org

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• Obviously, everything has always been defined by the dominant ideology. But the dominant ideology has been able to accept women's literature as well as men's literature. I would say that women have been hindered from creating for a variety of reasons, as Virginia Woolf so admirably explained in A Room of One's Own. When they have created, on the whole they have been recognized. In literature it hasn't been nearly as oppressive as in, say, painting, where even the existence of so many women painters has always been denied.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Men, Virginia, Creating

  Source: www.iaphitalia.org

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• At Princeton I wrote my junior paper on Virginia Woolf, and for my senior thesis I wrote on Samuel Beckett. I wrote some about "Between the Acts" and "Mrs. Dalloway'' but mostly about "To the Lighthouse." With Beckett I focused, perversely, on his novels, "Molloy," "Malone Dies," and "The Unnamable." That's when I decided I should never write again.

  David Duchovny

  Senior, Writing, Virginia

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done - people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway - in France we have Nathalie Sarraute - and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater. I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently.

  Agnes Varda

  Virginia, Years, People

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title. - Virginia Woolf, from Jacob's Room Television is chewing gum for the eyes.

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  Book, Heart, Eye

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• Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions.

  Edward Albee

  Live Life, Mean, Virginia

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.52, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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