Author Quotes
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and also a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
— A Room of One's Own (1929)
Woolf's materialist feminist argument: intellectual and creative life depends on physical security. The body's needs are not separate from the mind's work.
“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
— The Voyage Out (1915)
From Woolf's debut novel. A deceptively simple observation that cuts against the impulse to withdraw — peace, she suggests, lies only in engagement.
“Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
— Mrs Dalloway (1925)
The novel's famous opening line. In a single sentence Woolf establishes character, class, agency, and the ordinary beauty of a June morning in London.
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
— A Room of One's Own (1929)
Woolf's defiant response to the exclusion of women from the libraries at Oxford and Cambridge. Institutional gatekeeping cannot contain thought.
“For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of — to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone.”
— To the Lighthouse (1927)
Mrs Ramsay's moment of solitary respite. Woolf captures the deep need for a self that exists apart from social roles — the luxury of simply being.
“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
— Monday or Tuesday (1921)
From the essay "An Unwritten Novel." A compressed statement of the social self as captivity — others' perceptions constrain us as effectively as walls.