"Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotchpotch of impulses, our perpetual miracle - for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death; let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life."

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Source: Virginia Woolf, Andrew McNeillie (1986). “The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1925-1928”, Chatto & Windus

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Virginia Woolf

Novelist

Virginia Woolf was a British author known for her modernist literature and pioneering feminist ideas, particularly in 'Mrs. Dalloway' and 'A Room of One's Own'.

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"Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once."

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