Virginia Woolf Quotes
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Fear no more, says the heart.
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A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life
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If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women.
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If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?
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Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.
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I went from one to the other holding my sorrow - no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life - for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken - I to whom there is no beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely.
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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.
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Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.
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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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I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it.
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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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Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.
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A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.
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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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A strange thing has happened - while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.
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All extremes of feeling are allied to madness.
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I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.
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Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
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And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover.
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All artists need a room of their own
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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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Women alone stir my imagination.
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and even a tea party means apprehension, breakage
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Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.