Virginia Woolf Quotes
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What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once.
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I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.
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Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.
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Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.
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She was like a crinkled poppy; with the desire to drink dry dust.
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But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.
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Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
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One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.
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Books are the mirrors of the soul.
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Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
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Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.
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For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? --some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning--indeed they did.
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The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme -- thinking too much.
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I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?
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Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, halfway down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waves swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.
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Why have I so little control? It is the case of much waste and pain in my life.
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How lovely goodness is in those who, stepping lightly, go smiling through the world.
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There was a day when I liked writing letters -- it has gone. Unfortunately the passion for getting them remains.
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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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A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
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Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.
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For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.
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I am rooted, but I flow.
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One must love everything.