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I want the concentration and the romance, and the words all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.
Virginia Woolf
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A million candles burnt in him without his being at the trouble of lighting a single one.
Virginia Woolf
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One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
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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.
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The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.
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The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.
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I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.
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Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.
Virginia Woolf
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Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.
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I am amused at my relations with her: left so ardent in January – and now what? Also I like her presence and her beauty. Am I in love with her? But what is love? Her being 'in love' with me, excites and flatters; and interests. What is this 'love'?
Virginia Woolf
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Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
Virginia Woolf
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Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read.
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Vague as all good definitions are, 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.
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Unless you catch ideas on the wing and nail them down, you will soon cease to have any.
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If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don't admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don't do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.
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As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.
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These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.
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She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was however; there she was.
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There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.
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Letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps - who knows? - we might talk by the way.
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Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.
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The transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his works depend.
Virginia Woolf
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I was lying in bed this morning and saying to myself, 'the remarkable thing about Ethel is her stupendous self-satisfaction' when in came your letter to confirm this profound psychological observation. How delighted I was!
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Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine.... It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.
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It is equally vain, she thought, for you to think you can protect me, or for me to think I can worship you. The light of truth beats upon us without shadow, and the light of truth is damnably unbecoming to us both.
Virginia Woolf
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Quote of the day
No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Carrie Chapman Catt
Virginia Woolf
Creative Commons
Born:
January 25, 1882
Died:
March 28, 1941
(aged 59)
Bio:
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century.
Known for:
Mrs Dalloway (1925)
To the Lighthouse (1927)
A Room of One's Own (1929)
The Waves (1931)
Most used words:
life
people
mind
thought
time
human
writing
love
woman
truth
women
books
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