Virginia Woolf Quotes, Book Quotes, Writing Quotes

a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Book Quotes , Writing Quotes

I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity.

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

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There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.

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How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Mean Quotes , Reality Quotes

At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial-and any question about sex is that-one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Sex Quotes , Doe Quotes

Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Time Quotes , Age Quotes

To make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Fire Quotes , Ideas Quotes

Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Dark Quotes , Apparitions Quotes

Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.

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So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball

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old emotions like old families have intermarried and have many connections.

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If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people readingfor the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Book Quotes , Reading Quotes

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Courage Quotes , Mean Quotes

There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Voice Quotes , Doubt Quotes

The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.

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I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Silence Quotes , Needs Quotes

[Final diary entry:] Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that it's seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.

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I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.

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Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing.

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