Virginia Woolf Quotes
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I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.
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As nobody can possibly tell me whether one's writing is bad or good, the only certain value is one's own pleasure. I am sure of that.
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For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.
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A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.
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I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it.
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I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
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Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
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Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.
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I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.
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Love had a thousand shapes.
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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.
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Lord, how tired one gets of one's own writing.
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Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes.
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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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But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.
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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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Oh, I am in love with life!
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I will dream today; for I must unscrew my head somehow.
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The way to write well is to live intensely.
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It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality.
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No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.
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I have sometimes dreamt ... that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards -- their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble -- the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.
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You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort.
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Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.