The other day I discovered something interesting about myself. See, it started off as an average day. I was puttering around on facebook, since I just couldn’t bring myself to start what I knew would be a very long and boring essay, when I randomly clicked on my, “info” section. I have no clue why I did that. I mean, I created that part myself. I knew everything I put there were things I obviously loved. But as I was scrolling through the list of people I admire, the movies I like, and the books I enjoy, I realized that I love strong women. Let me be a little more specific. I admire women who thought differently during a time when they were told to simply make dinner and look pretty. I love the early feminists who weren’t afraid to just be themselves. One of them was Virginia Wolf.

She wrote many articles and stories that are both poetic, and yet, ring resiliently of truth. Virginia was born in 1882 in London, and had a normal childhood until her mother died unexpectedly a few years later. After this, she suffered from her first mental breakdown. Virginia struggled for many years, even when she was married and doing what she loved best: writing. Her works depict her views on life and death, and how each person has a, “sane” and “insane” side. An amazing essay of hers is, “A Room of One’s Own,” where she explores the idea of women writers, and being true characters in a time that was dominated by men.

Yes, she had problems, but her work is still read by millions today. She was one of the first feminists, who also had the knack for truly conveying the depth that surrounds the human subconscious. Here are a few of her inspiring, deep, rather dark, quotes.

The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

We may enjoy our room in the tower, with the painted walls and the commodious bookcases, but down in the garden there is a man digging who buried his father this morning, and it is he and his like who live the real life and speak the real language.

For ourselves, who are ordinary men and women, let us return thanks to Nature for her bounty by using every one of the senses she has given us; vary our state as much as possible; turn now this side, now that, to the warmth, and relish to the full before the sun goes down the kisses of youth and the echoes of a beautiful voice singing Catullus.

But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgments, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer.

A light here required a shadow there.

What is the meaning of life? That was all — a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other.

When a subject is highly controversial — and any question about sex is that — one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

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

Life for both sexes — and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement — is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle.

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.

I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee's life of the poet. She died young — alas, she never wrote a word... Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to-night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.

Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.

They never pulled the curtains till it was too dark to see, nor shut the windows till it was too cold. Why shut out the day before it was over? The flowers were still bright; the birds chirped. You could see more in the evening often when nothing interrupted, when there was no fish to order, no telephone to answer.

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

I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.