Search quotes

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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
be2612e	Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.		reading women teaching	Virginia Woolf
5d1d53f	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.			Virginia Woolf
eca8f15	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.		suicide preservation	Virginia Woolf
0867a6c	First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.		time	Virginia Woolf
9bc9206	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.			Virginia Woolf
3f1ef40	Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.		unhappiness	Virginia Woolf
926f5fd	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.			Virginia Woolf
2f2b7bf	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.		artists arts women empowerment restrictions encroachment careers occupation skills liberation women-writers gender creativity	Virginia Woolf
8462ca0	The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.		shakespeare	Virginia Woolf
fae179d	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?			Virginia Woolf
e001240	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?			Virginia Woolf
0f52444	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.		words poetry	Virginia Woolf
0b21238	I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow.			Virginia Woolf
e0966cc	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.		reading writing	Virginia Woolf
e9ec1ea	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.			Virginia Woolf
3f3d576	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.		words literature reading	Virginia Woolf
d697010	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.		literary	Virginia Woolf
624f58e	And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover.			Virginia Woolf
c6cec63	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.		literature nature poetry writing green drama	Virginia Woolf
170bb41	anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.		libraries virginia-woolf	Virginia Woolf
b4c8219	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			Virginia Woolf
4821a71	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.			Virginia Woolf
81affdc	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.		catastrophes deaths diseases murders kill	Virginia Woolf
415daf2	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 ..		wisdom inspirational	Virginia Woolf
7184d37	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.		reading preconceptions open-mindedness expectations	Virginia Woolf
91c6570	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.			Virginia Woolf
1dc5822	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?		books faces shop windows face shops window pages search	Virginia Woolf
90dcfb6	These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom.			Virginia Woolf
86fb636	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.		solitude	Virginia Woolf
b6f661b	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..		beauty-of-the-world emotions	Virginia Woolf
7293c4c	Still, life had a way of adding day to day			virginia woolf
fcd7dc7	The moment was all; the moment was enough.			Virginia Woolf
5cbd082	I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.			Virginia Woolf
dcbad8f	Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing.			Virginia Woolf
83a42df	I am not one and simple, but complex and many.		identity	Virginia Woolf
5e0de90	My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.			Virginia Woolf
083c7b0	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.			Virginia Woolf
04e8bcc	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			Virginia Woolf
97e6aa4	Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.		life	Virginia Woolf
f2b793f	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..		revelry sunset party	Virginia Woolf
4bf203c	clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.		solitude loneliness personality isolation	Virginia Woolf
12c1473	But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.		nature russia	Virginia Woolf
6d491ac	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 wi..		friends life	Virginia Woolf
0afd581	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.			Virginia Woolf

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