Virginia Woolf Quotes
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There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.
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Writing is a divine art, and the more I write and read the more I love it.
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He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.
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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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It is from the middle class that writers spring, because, it is in the middle class only that the practice of writing is as natural and habitual as hoeing a field or building a house.
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The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveler, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride.
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Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit.
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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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When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.
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Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
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We scarcely wish to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.
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There'll be oceans of talk and emotions without end.
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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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For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.
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Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is very opposite of what it is above.
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I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.
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Dance music ... stirs some barbaric instinct - lulled asleep in our sober lives - you forget centuries of civilization in a second, & yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.
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When she read just now to James, 'and there were numbers of soldiers with kettledrums and trumpets,' and his eyes darkened, she thought, why should they grow up, and lose all that?
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I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.
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But the close withdrew: the hand softened. It was over-- the moment.
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Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody.
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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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But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.
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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.