Virginia Woolf Quotes, Echoes Quotes, Self Quotes

This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Echoes Quotes , Self Quotes

The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent...there must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Artist Quotes , Order Quotes

There is something about the present which we would not exchange, though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in.

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It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.

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Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.

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But the close withdrew: the hand softened. It was over-- the moment.

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We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Peace Quotes , War Quotes

When she read just now to James, 'and there were numbers of soldiers with kettledrums and trumpets,' and his eyes darkened, she thought, why should they grow up, and lose all that?

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Growing Up Quotes , Grows Quotes

Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Flower Quotes , Tree Quotes

I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Weed Quotes , Women Quotes

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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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Fall Quotes , Desert Quotes

And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Literature Quotes , Antagonist Quotes

In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.

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

For some time she observed a great yellow butterfly, which was opening and closing its wings very slowly on a little flat stone. "What is it to be in love?" she demanded, after a long silence; each word as it came into being seemed to shove itself out into an unknown sea. Hypnotized by the wings of the butterfly, and awed by the discovery of a terrible possibility in life, she sat for some time longer. When the butterfly flew away, she rose, and within, her two books beneath her arm returned again, much as a soldier prepares for battle.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Book Quotes , Butterfly Quotes

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.

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In fact, though their acquaintance had been so short, they had guessed, as always happens between lovers, everything of any importance about each other in two seconds at the utmost, and it now remained only to fill in such unimportant details as what they were called; where they lived; and whether they were beggars or people of substance.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Two Quotes , People Quotes

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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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Writing Quotes , Reality Quotes

The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.

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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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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Cat Quotes , Men Quotes

Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Animal Quotes , Self Quotes