Virginia Woolf Quotes
My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?
Quotes to Explore
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I was certainly a better actor after my five years in Hollywood. I had learned to be natural - never to exaggerate. I found I could act on the stage in just the same way as I had acted in a studio: using my ordinary voice, eliminating gestures, keeping everything extremely simple.
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I want to entertain people, but with some substance.
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It was just such a demeaning thing to do, being in silent movies. They'd call you up and tell you, 'Hey, jump off this building!' and they'd give you a hundred bucks, and you'd do it.
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The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.
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A zeal for the defence of their country led these heroes to the scene of action, though with a few men to attack a powerful army of experienced warriors.
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Only a few good leaders have paused to reflect seriously on being leaders.
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Most people are prisoners, thinking only about the future or living in the past. They are not in the present, and the present is where everything begins.
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Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they're growing.
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I'm very involved in the writing on every level.
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I flunked my exam for university two times before I was accepted by what was considered my city's worst university, Hangzhou Teachers University. I was studying to be a high school English teacher. In my university, I was elected student chairman and later became chairman of the city's Students Federation.
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We all go to the theater and cinema to be inspired and moved on an emotional level, sometimes to laughter, sometimes to tears. Once I discovered that acting could have such an effect, I was sold. It has been one of the most rewarding discoveries I have ever made.
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When I remember my life in Russia it is in totally dark colours.
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These days we're all hyper-aware of the canonical way in which stories are supposed to play out - people are taught all about three-act scripting and where to put the reversal and all of that - and I think we can do more interesting narratives.
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Pain is never permanent.
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I want people to come away from my book with questions. Questions about virtue and goodness. Not answers.
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Wanted: a man who is larger than his calling, who considers it a low estimate of his occupation to value it merely as a means of getting a living.
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We sat down and read it for the first time and I thanked God under my breath, because they were all so good. And my leading ladies are both exceptional. I mean, everybody in the play. I could just go on all night about them.
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You could give the best audition ever and not get the role or not get a callback because you just weren't what they were looking for.
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He who knows only his own side of the case (argument) knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.
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Everybody has a gas-guzzling car because people like SUVs. They would like SUVs if they were hybrid vehicles that had the same horsepower and used less gasoline. Instead, what the auto manufacturers are doing is building SUVs that are hybrid vehicles that use the same amount of gasoline because they up the horsepower. That's a decision that they make to market irresponsible economic behavior. The American people like the SUVs, they have kids, they, they need them, they get around in them, but we have options.
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Because the brain can be guided by rational calculation only in a limited degree, it must fall back on the nuances of pleasure and pain mediated by the limbic system and other lower centers of the brain.
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Security is elusive. It's impossible. We all die. We all get old. We all get sick. People leave us. People change us. Nothing is secure.
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I don’t believe in God. She drops by once in a while and we argue about it. Now can you stop yammering on with your questions long enough for us to steal a few horses?
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My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?
