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In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.
Virginia Woolf -
No, I'm not clever. I've always cared more for people than for ideas.
Virginia Woolf
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How remorseless life is!
Virginia Woolf -
As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.
Virginia Woolf -
After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.
Virginia Woolf -
And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.
Virginia Woolf -
Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.
Virginia Woolf -
Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?
Virginia Woolf
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Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you
Virginia Woolf -
With my cheek leant upon the window pane I like to fancy that I am pressing as closely as can be upon the massy wall of time, which is forever lifting and pulling and letting fresh spaces of life in upon us. May it be mine to taste the moment before it has spread itself over the rest of the world! Let me taste the newest and the freshest.
Virginia Woolf -
The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye, that opened suddenly, and softly in the evening. Now— James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with black and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too.
Virginia Woolf -
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf -
We must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments.
Virginia Woolf -
One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one's words.
Virginia Woolf
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a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.
Virginia Woolf -
Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.
Virginia Woolf -
Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.
Virginia Woolf -
At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial-and any question about sex is that-one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.
Virginia Woolf -
It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.
Virginia Woolf -
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.
Virginia Woolf
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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.
Virginia Woolf -
I prefer men to cauliflowers
Virginia Woolf -
She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.
Virginia Woolf -
Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.
Virginia Woolf