Virginia Woolf Quotes: Google Doodle Honors Pioneering Female Novelist On 136th Birthday

The Google Doodle on Jan. 25 honors the British pioneering female novelist Virginia Woolf with a portrait to mark what would have been her 136th birthday.

Born in London on Jan. 25, 1882, the author of “Mrs. Dalloway,” “To The Lighthouse,” and “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf’s life and work still remains highly influential on the world of literature and beyond. She began writing professionally in the 1900s. She was homeschooled in English classics and Victorian literature for the most part of her childhood. Her parents were prominent personalities in London’s literary and artistic circuits.

Woolf has been known for her pioneering work in the use of the stream-of-conscious narrative approach and was regarded as one of the greatest authors of her time for exploring modernism and feminist narratives in her novels.

To celebrate the British literary luminary's 136^th birthday, here are some of her famous quotes collected from Goodreads and Brainyquote:

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

“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.”

“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”

“Writing is like sex. First, you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”

“The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent, and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.”

“Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.”

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”

“A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.”

“When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.”

“The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.”

“A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.”

“Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.”

“Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”

“The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.”