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How can I express the darkness?
Virginia Woolf -
So that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again.
Virginia Woolf
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But words have been used too often; touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street. The words we seek hang close to the tree. We come at dawn and find them sweet beneath the leaf.
Virginia Woolf -
And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.
Virginia Woolf -
Sir, I would trust you with my heart. Moreover, we have left our bodies in the banqueting hall. Those on the turf are the shadows of our souls.
Virginia Woolf -
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
Virginia Woolf -
All extremes of feeling are allied to madness.
Virginia Woolf -
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.
Virginia Woolf
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Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.
Virginia Woolf -
How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it is liking one felt, or disliking?
Virginia Woolf -
O why do I ever let anyone read what I write! Every time I have to go through a breakfast with a letter of criticism I swear I will write for my own praise or blame in future. It is a misery.
Virginia Woolf -
We insist, it seems, on living.
Virginia Woolf -
I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.
Virginia Woolf -
I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older.
Virginia Woolf
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Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going.
Virginia Woolf -
When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.
Virginia Woolf -
Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.
Virginia Woolf -
All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the general mind which they interpret and indeed almost discover, so that we come to read them rather for that than for any story or character or scene of seperate excellence.
Virginia Woolf -
I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.
Virginia Woolf -
What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment.
Virginia Woolf
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A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life
Virginia Woolf -
Lord, how tired one gets of one's own writing.
Virginia Woolf -
Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes. Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf -
The way to write well is to live intensely.
Virginia Woolf