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So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.
Virginia Woolf -
Life would split apart without letters.
Virginia Woolf
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She belonged to a different age, but being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable --- this interminable life.
Virginia Woolf -
Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.
Virginia Woolf -
There was a day when I liked writing letters -- it has gone. Unfortunately the passion for getting them remains.
Virginia Woolf -
For nothing was simply one thing.
Virginia Woolf -
Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.
Virginia Woolf -
Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.
Virginia Woolf
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One must love everything.
Virginia Woolf -
Let us not take for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.
Virginia Woolf -
I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.
Virginia Woolf -
No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.
Virginia Woolf -
I ride rough waters, and shall sink with no one to save me.
Virginia Woolf -
... the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected ... the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.
Virginia Woolf
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Books are the mirrors of the soul.
Virginia Woolf -
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
Virginia Woolf -
I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.
Virginia Woolf -
She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!
Virginia Woolf -
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
Virginia Woolf -
Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred.
Virginia Woolf
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Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.
Virginia Woolf -
Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.
Virginia Woolf -
In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.
Virginia Woolf -
For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? --some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning--indeed they did.
Virginia Woolf