Virginia Woolf Quotes
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But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.
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a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.
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She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.
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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. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.
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Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.
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I prefer men to cauliflowers
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I like the unreality of your mind; the whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd.
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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.
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We must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments.
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Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.
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I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.
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I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.
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No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
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I really don't advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married
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I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?
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I’m not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and arrows of sadness.
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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.
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... the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected ... the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.
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My notion's to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves.
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Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.
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Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.
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For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?
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Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.
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Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.