Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf died at the age of 59 George C. Beresford/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

More than 75 years after her death in 1941, Virigina Woolf is still considered one of the most iconic modernist writers of the time. Her approaches to literary style, women's writing and her experimentation with the nonlinear narrative continue to be studied and appreciated the world over.

The London-born author, popularly known for Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To The Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), was equally famous for her mental breakdowns, which eventually led to her suicide in 1941, by drowning.

From the feminist standpoint, Woolf paved the way for numerous other female writers by shedding light on the inner lives of women restricted by the phallic society they lived in.

On the occasion of her 135<sup>th birth anniversary, IBTimes UK takes a look at some of her most memorable quotes — on life, feminism and society.

— To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

— Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

— The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

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

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

— Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

— Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.

— Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

— Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

— For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

— One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

— Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

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