“The names of individuals who surrendered their belief in a universe governed by a supernatural being include: Percy Shelley, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, Simone Beauvoir, Salmon Rushdie, and Marquis Sade. Others who choose to live without religion—Ernestine Rose and Charles Bradlaugh are examples—should be better known, given their historical import and former notoriety.”

— Mitchell Stephens (2014), Imagine There’s No Heaven [1]

“I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in god and immortality, and goes to church. I was shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in god.”

— Virginia Woolf (1928), “Letter to T.S. Eliot” [2]

“From this I reach what might be called a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no god; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”

— Virginia Woolf (c.1925), Moments of Being [2]

“A sight, an emotion, creates this ‘wave in the mind’, long before it makes words to fit it.”

— Virginia Woolf (c.1925) (Ѻ)(Ѻ)