Virginia Woolf Quotes
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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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We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.
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Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.
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The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
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Her life-that was the only chance she had-the short season between two silences.
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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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What does the brain matter compared with the heart?
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I have a feeling I shall go mad. I cannot go on longer in these terrible times. I shan't recover this time. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it but cannot fight any longer.
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Peace was the third emotion. Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotions made the ply of human life.
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The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.
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His eyes were bright, and, indeed, he scarcely knew whether they held dreams or realities...and in five minutes she had filled the shell of the old dream with the flesh of life.
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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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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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The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published.
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I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh.
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Now the writer, I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of ... reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.
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To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?
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She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.
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I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.
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With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes -- one of the tragedies of married life.
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It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilized.
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The chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of-man.
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Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.
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Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.