Virginia Woolf Quotes
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To enjoy freedom ... we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose.
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Intimacy is a difficult art.
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A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.
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To make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action.
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[Final diary entry:] Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that it's seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.
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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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It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.
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Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes. Virginia Woolf
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Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing.
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Like" and "like" and "like"--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?
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I attain a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the mind's passage through the world, achieve in the end some kind of whole made of shivering fragments.
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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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I feel certain that I'm going mad again, I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices
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I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
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We scarcely wish to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.
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It's my choice, to choose how to live my life.
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They all dreamt of each other that night, as was natural, considering how thin the partitions were between them, and how strangely they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each other in mid-ocean, and see every detail of each others' faces, and hear whatever they chanced to say.
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But I don't think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age.
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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.
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There is something I want-something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper without knowing quite what it was, with her eyes closed.
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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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People only become writers if they can't find the one book they've always wanted to read.
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Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover seeds of truth.
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Then may I tell you that the very next words I read were these – ‘Chloe liked Olivia…’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.