That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly.


Virginia Woolf

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Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.
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Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
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It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
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As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
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The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but ...
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Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all ...
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Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of ro...
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I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I...
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We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
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Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
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The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
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Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distort...
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Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned...
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The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the poli...
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That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
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The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.
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Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or
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When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.
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What is meant by reality? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable -- now to be...
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One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats --and one always secret...
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Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
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A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
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He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman se...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hea...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their ...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want a...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury y...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like ...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often ...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty obser...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all g...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am roo...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people ...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her p...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
I rise from my worst disasters, I turn, I change.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole worl...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the sol...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
What does the brain matter compared with the heart?
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure -- the relationship so secret and private com...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly an...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality o...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
I am rooted, but I flow.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always se...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is ...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets—what nonsense was he ...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck betwee...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Yes, I deserve a spring–I owe nobody nothing.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtl...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
What I value is the naked contact of a mind.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic ac...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense ...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last,...
VIRGINIA WOOLF