Virginia Woolf Quotes
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I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.
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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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Words belong to each other.
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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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All extremes of feeling are allied to madness.
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The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.
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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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All extremes are dangerous.
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I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual
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And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover.
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Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.
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We scarcely wish to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.
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The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.
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It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.
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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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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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To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.
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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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Women alone stir my imagination.
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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.
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Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
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Talents of the novelist: ... observation of character, analysis of emotion, people's feelings, personal relations.
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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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For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone.