Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.” I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.

Leonard Woolf
About This Quote

Virginia Woolf was a novelist and short story writer. She wrote her most famous novel, "Mrs. Dalloway" in 1925. The story is about a woman named Clarissa who spends the day before World War II.

She is married to Richard Dalloway, an art critic who likes to read and write poetry. Richard is very much involved in modern poetry and even has a meeting at his house with several other poets. Richard seems to have everything he wants—a happy marriage, good friends, and good health—until the day she goes to Richard’s house for dinner.

Richard has died in his sleep that night, so Richard’s wife Clarissa has the house all to herself that evening. As the story unfolds, we see Clarissa reading Richard’s poems, making notes of where she wants to go for dinner, and finally realizing that life isn’t always as good as it seems. You can read more about Virginia Woolf here: http://www.virginia-woolf-online.org/.

Source: Downhill All The Way: An Autobiography Of The Years 1919 To 1939

Some Similar Quotes
  1. I have decided to stick to love... Hate is too great a burden to bear. - Unknown
  2. Hate the sin, love the sinner. - Mahatma Gandhi
  3. The opposite of love is not hate, its apathy, when you simply don't bother about that person! - Amish Tripathi
  4. Hate is... It's too easy. Love. Love takes courage. - Hannah Harrington
  5. Stronger than lover's love is lover's hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make. - Euripides
More Quotes By Leonard Woolf
  1. Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.” I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.
  2. The mere fact that a very large number of people believe such a thing and that the world would be a better place if it were true, is no reason for believing that it is true.
  3. Novels by serious writers of genius often eventually become best-sellers, but most contemporary best-sellers are written by second-class writers whose psychological brew contains a touch of naïvety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift, and a mysterious sympathy with the day-dreams of ordinary people.
  4. Leonard Woolf in a letter to Lytton Strachey said he hated John Maynard Keynes "for his crass stupidity and hideous face".
  5. Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation... If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable.
Related Topics