Virginia Woolf Quotes, Self Quotes, Six Quotes

A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Self Quotes , Six Quotes

They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Book Quotes , Mind Quotes

I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Writing Quotes , Thinking Quotes

Chastity ... has, even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Religious Quotes , Cutting Quotes

While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Humility Quotes , Dark Quotes

So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Journey Quotes , Vivid Quotes

The good diarist writes either for himself alone or for a posterity so distant that it can safely hear every secret and justly weigh every motive. For such an audience there is need neither of affectation nor of restraint. Sincerity is what they ask, detail, and volume; skill with the pen comes in conveniently, but brilliance is not necessary; genius is a hindrance even; and should you know your business and do it manfully, posterity will let you off mixing with great men, reporting famous affairs, or having lain with the first ladies in the land.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Writing Quotes , Men Quotes

But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.

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I grow numb; I grow stiff. How shall I break up this numbness which discredits my sympathetic heart?

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Heart Quotes , Numbness Quotes

But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter!

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Eye Quotes

Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Lying Quotes , Eye Quotes

Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Sight Quotes , Profound Quotes

... the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his works depend.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Nice Quotes , Two Quotes

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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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Freedom Quotes , Rain Quotes

Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.

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It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Food Quotes , Cooking Quotes

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Life Quotes , Time Quotes

When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Reading Quotes , People Quotes

They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Travel Quotes , Sky Quotes

And it was awfully strange, he thought, how she still had the power, as she came tinkling, rustling, still had the power as she came across the room, to make the moon, which he detested, rise at Bourton on the terrace in the summer sky.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Summer Quotes , Moon Quotes