Woolf Quotes
The best sayings about Woolf that you can share on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and other social networks!
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I fell in love with Virginia Woolf in college. I especially admire how well she writes about daily life, how she captures so much meaning and consequence in the smallest details of a day.
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At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.
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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.
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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.
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I like reading... French, Russian classics - Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert. I also like Hemingway, Virginia Woolf.
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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.
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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 writersPound, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Woolf, Williamsspoke 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.
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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.
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I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time.
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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
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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.
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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.
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As an actor, to go and see those shows - great plays like 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' and Clifford Odets's 'Golden Boy' - it's so exhilarating. I'd personally love to perform the role of Jerry in Edward Albee's 'The Zoo Story.' He's a transient, lost soul, and an example of humanity at its rawest.
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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.
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Come on, man.... Hemingway, Sexton, Plath, Woolf. You can't kill yourself before you're even published.
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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
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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
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I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.
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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.
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Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.
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It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.
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Each time I undertake to reread Virginia Woolf, I am somewhat baffled by the signature breathlessness and relentlessly "poetic" tone, the shimmering impressionism, so very different from the vivid, precise, magisterial (and often very funny) prose of her contemporary James Joyce.
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I loved languages, and loved learning languages. It was fantastic. But I was alone there. I remember that time as a real Virginia Woolf time. More than any language it was her language that influenced me.
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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.
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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.
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It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to write, however entirely different one's writing will be.
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Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going.
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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.
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I'm kind of still down with Virg Woolf on this one: "women must kill the aesthetic ideal through which they themselves have been 'killed' into art."
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Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do.
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