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Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.
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Virginia Woolf |
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Communication is truth; communication is happiness. To share is our duty; to go down boldly and bring to light those hidden thoughts which are the most diseased; to conceal nothing; to pretend nothing; if we are ignorant to say so; if we love our friends to let them know it.
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Virginia Woolf |
6ff59f4
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Fear no more, says the heart...
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Virginia Woolf |
be2612e
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Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.
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reading
women
teaching
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Virginia Woolf |
5d1d53f
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With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.
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Virginia Woolf |
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A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.
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suicide
preservation
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Virginia Woolf |
0867a6c
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First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
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time
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Virginia Woolf |
9bc9206
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One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.
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Virginia Woolf |
3f1ef40
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Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.
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unhappiness
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Virginia Woolf |
926f5fd
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We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie asleep.
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Virginia Woolf |
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Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.
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artists
arts
women
empowerment
restrictions
encroachment
careers
occupation
skills
liberation
women-writers
gender
creativity
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Virginia Woolf |
8462ca0
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The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.
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shakespeare
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Virginia Woolf |
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Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?
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Virginia Woolf |
e001240
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Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?--startling, unexpected, unknown?
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Virginia Woolf |
0f52444
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Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.
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words
poetry
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Virginia Woolf |
0b21238
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I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow.
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Virginia Woolf |
e0966cc
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For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.
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reading
writing
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Virginia Woolf |
e9ec1ea
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It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself.
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Virginia Woolf |
3f3d576
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Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.
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words
literature
reading
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Virginia Woolf |
d697010
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All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.
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literary
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Virginia Woolf |
624f58e
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And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover.
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Virginia Woolf |
c6cec63
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Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.
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literature
nature
poetry
writing
green
drama
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Virginia Woolf |
170bb41
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anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.
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libraries
virginia-woolf
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Virginia Woolf |
b4c8219
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for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge
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Virginia Woolf |
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A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her.
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Virginia Woolf |
81affdc
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It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.
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catastrophes
deaths
diseases
murders
kill
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Virginia Woolf |
415daf2
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It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. 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. And why, if this -- and much more than this is true -- why ..
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wisdom
inspirational
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Virginia Woolf |
7184d37
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Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.
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reading
preconceptions
open-mindedness
expectations
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Virginia Woolf |
91c6570
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One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy.
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Virginia Woolf |
1dc5822
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Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?
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books
faces
shop
windows
face
shops
window
pages
search
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Virginia Woolf |
90dcfb6
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These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom.
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Virginia Woolf |
86fb636
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But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects; and sounds very remote and then very close; flesh being gashed and blood spurting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.
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solitude
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Virginia Woolf |
b6f661b
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She would not say of any one in the world that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, far out to the sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or muc..
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beauty-of-the-world
emotions
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Virginia Woolf |
7293c4c
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Still, life had a way of adding day to day
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virginia woolf |
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The moment was all; the moment was enough.
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Virginia Woolf |
5cbd082
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I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.
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Virginia Woolf |
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Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing.
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Virginia Woolf |
83a42df
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I am not one and simple, but complex and many.
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identity
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Virginia Woolf |
5e0de90
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My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.
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Virginia Woolf |
083c7b0
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The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.
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Virginia Woolf |
04e8bcc
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some we know to be dead even though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through all the forms of life; other are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six
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Virginia Woolf |
97e6aa4
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Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.
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life
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Virginia Woolf |
f2b793f
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One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic thinned; motor cars, tinkling, darting, succeeded the lumber of vans; and he..
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revelry
sunset
party
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Virginia Woolf |
4bf203c
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clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.
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solitude
loneliness
personality
isolation
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Virginia Woolf |