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I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens.
Virginia Woolf -
The weight of the world is on our shoulders, its vision is through our eyes; if we blink or look aside, or turn back to finger what Plato said or remember Napoleon and his conquests, we inflict on the world the injury of some obliquity. This is life.
Virginia Woolf
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A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.
Virginia Woolf -
She felt, with her hand on the nursery door, that community of feeling with other people which emotion gives as if the walls of partition had become so thin that practically (the feeling was one of relief and happiness) it was all one stream.
Virginia Woolf -
Criticism? An artist wants praise. Praise.
Virginia Woolf -
To make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action.
Virginia Woolf -
Now the writer, I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of ... reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.
Virginia Woolf -
Oh, I am in love with life!
Virginia Woolf
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Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover seeds of truth.
Virginia Woolf -
I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street.
Virginia Woolf -
A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.
Virginia Woolf -
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.
Virginia Woolf -
Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.
Virginia Woolf -
Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.
Virginia Woolf
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I will dream today; for I must unscrew my head somehow.
Virginia Woolf -
Do not move, do not go. Sink within this moment. Hold it for ever.
Virginia Woolf -
Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.
Virginia Woolf -
Thoughts without words… Can that be?
Virginia Woolf -
It is equally vain,” she thought, “for you to think you can protect me, or for me to think I can worship you. The light of truth beats upon us without shadow, and the light of truth is damnably unbecoming to us both.
Virginia Woolf -
But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the teashop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him- he could not feel. He could reason; he could read, Dante for example, quite easily…he could add up his bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then- that he could not feel.
Virginia Woolf
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Never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having.
Virginia Woolf -
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.
Virginia Woolf -
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.
Virginia Woolf -
Intimacy is a difficult art.
Virginia Woolf