She looked before she drank. Looking was part of drinking. why waste sensation, she seemed to ask, why waste a single drop that can be pressed out of this ripe, this melting, this adorable world? Then she drank. And the air round her became threaded with sensation.

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

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A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

— Virginia Woolf

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Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

— Virginia Woolf

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Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

— Virginia Woolf

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Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

— 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

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