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How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.
Virginia Woolf
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If, then, one should try to sum up the character of women's fiction at the present moment, one would say that it is courageous; it is sincere; it keeps closely to what women feel. It is not bitter. It does not insist upon its femininity.
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He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above his paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged with existence.
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Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness.
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But the novels of women were not affected only by the necessarily narrow range of the writer's experience. They showed, at least in the nineteenth century, another characteristic which may be traced to the writer's sex. In Middlemarch and in Jane Eyre we are conscious not merely of the writer's character, as we are conscious of the character of Charles Dickens, but we are conscious of a woman's presence — of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights.
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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.
Virginia Woolf
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About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.
Virginia Woolf
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She had done the usual trick – been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst (if it had not been for Mr Bankes) were between men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere.
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They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.
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Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins—of happiness and unhappiness.
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So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.
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As a creator of character his peculiarity is that he creates wherever his eyes rest... With such a power at his command Dickens made his books blaze up, not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people upon the fire.
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I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older.
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There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay. Somehow or other, by dint of labor or bounty of nature, or both combined, the essay must be pure — pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.
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To know whom to write for is to know how to write.
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Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!
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Old emotions like old families have intermarried and have many connections.
Virginia Woolf
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I read the book of Job last night. I don't think God comes well out of it.
Virginia Woolf
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A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her.
Virginia Woolf
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Travelers are much at the mercy of phrases... vast generalizations formulate in their exposed brains.
Virginia Woolf
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You would get longer livelier and more frequent letters from me, if it weren't for the Christian religion. How that bell tolling at the end of the garden, dum dum, dum dum, annoys me! Why is Christianity so insistent and so sad?
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When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.
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Jealousy... survives every other passion of mankind...
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Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?
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But words have been used too often; touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street. The words we seek hang close to the tree. We come at dawn and find them sweet beneath the leaf.
Virginia Woolf
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We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
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)
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