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When people are happy they have a reserve upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre
Virginia Woolf -
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.
Virginia Woolf
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The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.
Virginia Woolf -
How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?
Virginia Woolf -
And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.
Virginia Woolf -
Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
Virginia Woolf -
Communication is truth; communication is happiness. To share is our duty; to go down boldly and bring to light those hidden thoughts which are the most diseased; to conceal nothing; to pretend nothing; if we are ignorant to say so; if we love our friends to let them know it.
Virginia Woolf -
I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.
Virginia Woolf
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One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.
Virginia Woolf -
They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.
Virginia Woolf -
He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds-that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things.
Virginia Woolf -
I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.
Virginia Woolf -
There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.
Virginia Woolf -
Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.
Virginia Woolf
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it is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams
Virginia Woolf -
Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement.
Virginia Woolf -
One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.
Virginia Woolf -
Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.
Virginia Woolf -
I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.
Virginia Woolf -
It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.
Virginia Woolf
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To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.
Virginia Woolf -
The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.
Virginia Woolf -
more and more I come to loathe any dominion of one over another; any leadership, any imposition of the will.
Virginia Woolf -
That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
Virginia Woolf