Virginia Woolf Quotes
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I find that when I've seen a certain number of people my mind becomes like an old match box -- the part one strikes on, I mean.
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The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
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How can I express the darkness?
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Habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play.
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All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are sides, and it is necessary for one side to beat another side.
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Nothing could be slow enough, nothing lasts too long. No pleasure could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf, this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank. Many a time had she gone, at Barton when they were all talking, to look at the sky; seen it between peoples shoulders at dinner; seen it in London when she could not sleep. She walked to the window.
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We are about to part," said Neville. "Here are the boxes; here are the cabs. There is Percival in his billycock hat. He will forget me. He will leave my letters lying about among guns and dogs unaswered. I shall send him poems and he will perhaps reply with a picture post card. But it is for that that I love him. I shall propose a meeting - under a clock, by some Cross; and shall wait and he will not come. It is for that that I love him.
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Criticism? An artist wants praise. Praise.
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It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.
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Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
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Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that
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... why do people who live in the country always give themselves such airs?
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She fell into a deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head. She saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head. While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea.
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King old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always to to a good man, they say.
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Marvelous are the innocent.
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This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.
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I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.
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The truer the facts the better the fiction.
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To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
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I am volatile for one, rigid for another, angular as an icicle in silver, or voluptuous as a candle flame in gold.
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O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!
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They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort.
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It is probable that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man.
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The chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of-man.