"But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory."
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Quote collection
Virginia Woolf quotes (page 10 of 41)
817 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it."
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"Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world."
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"Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously."
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"Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is very opposite of what it is above."
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"Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the"
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"She tapped on the window with her embossed hairbrush. They were too far off to hear. The drone of the trees was in their ears; the chirp of birds; other incidents of garden life, inaudible, invisible to her in the bedroom, absorbed them. Isolated on a green island, hedged about with snowdrops, laid with a counterpane of puckered silk, the innocent island floated under her window. Only George lagged behind."
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"She was like a crinkled poppy; with the desire to drink dry dust."
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"I like to have space to spread my mind out in."
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"Love had a thousand shapes."
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"I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful."
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"I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls."
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"The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl."
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"... it's been a perpetual discovery, my life. A miracle."
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"literature is the record of our discontent."
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"We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods."
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"Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does."
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"Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy."
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"How can I express the darkness?"
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"Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning."
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