Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 30

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But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them.

Virginia Woolf

Nature, Sunset, Russia

"Orlando (Annotated): A Biography".

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She began framing the words of her telegram into a senseless singsong; so that several park keepers looked at her with suspicion and were only brought to a favourable opinion of her sanity by noticing the pearl necklace which she wore.

Virginia Woolf

Singing, Necklaces, Pearls

"Orlando (Annotated): A Biography".

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The large shiny black forehead of the first whale was no more than two yards from us when it sank beneath the surface of the water, then we saw the huge blue-black bulk glide quietly under the raft right beneath our feet. It lay there for some time, dark and motionless, and we held our breath as we looked down on the gigantic curved back of a mammal a good deal longer than the raft.

Virginia Woolf

Time, Dark, Blue

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To love makes one solitary.

Virginia Woolf

Solitary

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.23, Broadview Press

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There is a sadness at the back of life which some people do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure.

Virginia Woolf

Sadness, People, Shadow

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.2261, Delphi Classics

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We insist, it seems, on living.

Virginia Woolf

Seems

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.691, Wordsworth Editions

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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.

Virginia Woolf

Drawing, Safety, Mind

Virginia Woolf (1990). “Orlando: A Biography”, Chatto & Windus

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But what a little I can get down into my pen of what is so vivid to my eyes, and not only to my eyes; also to some nervous fibre, or fanlike membrane in my species.

Virginia Woolf

Eye, Littles, Vivid

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4389, Delphi Classics

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He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above his paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged with existence.

Virginia Woolf

Reading, Sleep, Hands

Virginia Woolf (2016). “To the Lighthouse”, p.166, Tyché

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Now to sum it up,' said Bernard. 'Now to explain to you the meaning of my life. Since we do not know each other (though I met you once I think, on board a ship going to Africa), we can talk freely. The illusion is upon me that something adheres for a moment, has roundness, weight, depth, is completed. This, for the moment, seems to be my life. If it were possible, I would hand it you entire. I would break it off as one breaks off a bunch of grapes. I would say, "Take it. This is my life.

Virginia Woolf

Thinking, Break Off, Hands

Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.175, Virginia Woolf

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For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn.

Virginia Woolf

Swings, People, Dawn

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.972, Delphi Classics

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The root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty.

Virginia Woolf

Roots, Dirt

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.2101, Delphi Classics

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women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. ... Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own.

Virginia Woolf

Dog, Stress, Writing

Virginia Woolf, Morag Shiach (1998). “A Room of One's Own: And, Three Guineas”, p.141

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We seem to be riding on the top of the highest mast of the tallest ship; and yet at the same time we know that nothing of this sort matters; love is not proved thus, nor great achievements completed thus; so that we sport with the moment and preen our feathers in it lightly.

Virginia Woolf

Sports, Love Is, Achievement

Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.182, Oxford University Press

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To survive, each sentence must have, at its heart, a little spark of fire, and this, whatever the risk, the novelist must pluck with his own hands from the blaze.

Virginia Woolf

Heart, Fire, Hands

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3635, Delphi Classics

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She tapped on the window with her embossed hairbrush. They were too far off to hear. The drone of the trees was in their ears; the chirp of birds; other incidents of garden life, inaudible, invisible to her in the bedroom, absorbed them. Isolated on a green island, hedged about with snowdrops, laid with a counterpane of puckered silk, the innocent island floated under her window. Only George lagged behind.

Virginia Woolf

Garden, Islands, Bird

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.933, Wordsworth Editions

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To know whom to write for is to know how to write.

Virginia Woolf

Writing, Know How, Knows

Virginia Woolf (2013). “The Common Reader”, p.167, Lulu Press, Inc

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So that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again.

Virginia Woolf

Tattoo, Beach, Ocean

Virginia Woolf (2016). “To the Lighthouse”, p.15, Virginia Woolf

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What a labour writing is ... making one sentence do the work of a page; that's what I call hard work.

Virginia Woolf

Hard Work, Writing, Pages

Virginia Woolf (1975). “The Letters of Virginia Woolf: 1932-1935”

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I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you.

Virginia Woolf

Love, Thinking, Fiction

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Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep.

Virginia Woolf

Running, Book, Thinking

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Travelers are much at the mercy of phrases ... vast generalizations formulate in their exposed brains.

Virginia Woolf

Brain, Phrases, Mercy

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How are we to account for the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid which is so much involved in our love of ghost stories?

Virginia Woolf

Ghost Stories, Feelings, Our Love

Virginia Woolf (1967). “Collected essays”

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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!

Virginia Woolf

Beautiful, Eye, Winter

Virginia Woolf (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.303, OUP Oxford

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I’m not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and arrows of sadness.

Virginia Woolf

Sadness, Arrows, Dull

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Born: January 25, 1882
Died: March 28, 1941
Occupation: Writer
Cite this Page: Citation

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