Virginia Woolf Quotes, Wall Quotes, Writing Quotes

I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Wall Quotes , Writing Quotes

She felt drawing further from her and further from her an Archduke, (she did not mind that) a fortune, (she did not mind that) the safety and circumstance of married life, (she did not mind that) but life she heard going from her, and a lover.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Drawing Quotes , Safety Quotes

I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer?

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Hate Quotes , Worship You Quotes

People ask me why I write. I write to find out what I know.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Writing Quotes , People Quotes

I have sometimes dreamt ... that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards -- their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble -- the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Book Quotes , Reading Quotes

Mr. Beerbohm in his way is perfect ... He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes ... He is without doubt the prince of his profession.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Writing Quotes , Men Quotes

[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Funny Quotes , Pimples Quotes

To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Heart Quotes , Body Quotes

It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Feelings Quotes , Machines Quotes

Women alone stir my imagination.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Imagination Quotes

And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Life Is Quotes , Exciting Quotes

She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Happiness Quotes , Taxi Cabs Quotes

All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the general mind which they interpret and indeed almost discover, so that we come to read them rather for that than for any story or character or scene of seperate excellence.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Character Quotes , Atmosphere Quotes

To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Passion Quotes , Games Quotes

Life without illusion is a ghostly affair.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Affair Quotes

Talents of the novelist: ... observation of character, analysis of emotion, people's feelings, personal relations.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Character Quotes , People Quotes

Books should stand on their own feet ... If they need shoring up by a preface here, an introduction there, they have no more right to exist than a table that needs a wad of paper under one leg in order to stand steady.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Book Quotes , Feet Quotes

If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Writing Quotes , Together Quotes

The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Order Quotes , Empathy Quotes

Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Silly Quotes , Thinking Quotes