“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 3

About Virginia Woolf

1882 – 1941

English author and essayist considered one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. Known for stream-of-consciousness writing and pioneering essays on women and literature.

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“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.”

— Virginia Woolf

Attribution note: Source disputed or unverified.

“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”

— Virginia Woolf

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

— Virginia Woolf

“In theory there is nothing to hinder our following what we are taught; but in life there are many things to draw us aside.”

— Epictetus

“That which makes the man no worse than he was makes his life no worse: it has no power to harm, without or within.”

— Marcus Aurelius

“The young have exalted notions, because they have not been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations.”

— Aristotle

“We live in a country where the people own the Government and not in a country where the Government owns the people.”

— Winston Churchill

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”

— C.S. Lewis

“There is nothing to life that has value, except the degree of power—assuming that life itself is the will to power.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”

About Virginia Woolf

More from Virginia Woolf

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