"As an experience, madness is terrific ... and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about."
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Quote collection
Virginia Woolf quotes (page 24 of 41)
817 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable."
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"madam," the man cried, leaping to the ground, "you're hurt!" "I'm dead, sir!" she replied. A few minutes later, they became engaged."
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"There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death."
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"The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published."
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"Among the tortures and devestations of life is this then - our friends are not able to finish their stories."
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"It is no use trying to sum people up."
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"Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless."
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"To enjoy freedom ... we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose."
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"If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man; some think even greater."
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"A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine."
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"For women live much more in the past...they attach themselves to places."
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"Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said, or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them."
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"I have had my vision."
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"But I think I’m coloured by my own wishes, & experimental mood."
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"No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes"
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"The world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued."
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"To survive, each sentence must have, at its heart, a little spark of fire, and this, whatever the risk, the novelist must pluck with his own hands from the blaze."
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"I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it."
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"Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?"
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