"The profound difference that divides the human race is a question of bait - whether to fish with worms or not."
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Quote collection
Virginia Woolf quotes (page 18 of 41)
817 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say."
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"It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses."
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"There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby."
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"Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are."
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"The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark."
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"We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself."
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"To make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action."
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"Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time."
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"But words have been used too often; touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street. The words we seek hang close to the tree. We come at dawn and find them sweet beneath the leaf."
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"Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart."
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"We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable."
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"We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do not always come apart is the animating tension of all art."
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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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"Now the writer, I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of ... reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us."
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"I will go down with my colours flying."
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"War is not women's history."
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"If the best of one's feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?"
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"I like going from one lighted room to another, such is my brain to me; lighted rooms."
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"I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?"
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