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76fc8ca
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There are some books that LIVE," she mused. "They are young with us, and they grow old with us."
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Virginia Woolf |
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9895444
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It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.
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Virginia Woolf |
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04d7b68
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Roses," she thought sardonically, "All trash, m'dear."
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trash
roses
sardonic
flowers
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Virginia Woolf |
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8dcbf84
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I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said. But he never liked anyone who--our friends,' said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to marry her. Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was more unhappy than ..
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marriage
romance
sadness
love
moon
imagery
melancholy
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Virginia Woolf |
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3359d15
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Every season is likeable, and wet days and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life, can be full of dreams; and the most common actions -- a walk, a talk, solitude in one's own orchard -- can be enhanced and lit up by the association of the mind. Beauty is everywhere, and beauty is only two finger's-breadth from goodness.
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Virginia Woolf |
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ca8f650
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There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe. All is rippling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph.
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Virginia Woolf |
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93c2f88
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and even a tea party means apprehension, breakage
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Virginia Woolf |
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70e168b
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Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.
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Virginia Woolf |
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19d62a6
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We are all women you assure me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these - 'Chloe liked Olivia ...' Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women. 'Chloe liked Olivia,' I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia. And..
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Virginia Woolf |
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508c980
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I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism. And to alter now, cleanly and sanely, I want to shuffle off this loose living randomness: people; reviews; fame; all the glittering scales; and be withdrawn, and concentrated.
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Virginia Woolf |
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1e9e391
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Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty, so that all one's perceptions, half-way to truth, were tangled in a golden mesh? Or did she lock up within her some secret which certainly Lily Briscoe believed people must have for the world to go on at all? Every one could not be as helter skelter, hand to mouth as she was. But if they knew, could they tell one what they knew? Sitting on the floor with her ar..
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women
love
knowledge
intimacy
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Virginia Woolf |
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7046b16
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children never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of-- to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to be..
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solitude
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Virginia Woolf |
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e7cfac7
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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 as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, 'I am guarding you--I am your support," but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such ki..
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Virginia Woolf |
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1a76efe
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But this was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to sit in one's garden and look at the slopes of a hill running purple down into the distant heather.
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Virginia Woolf |
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576d42c
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I want to resemble a sort of liquid light which stretches beyond visibility or invisibility. Tonight I wish to have the valor and daring to belong to the moon
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Virginia Woolf |
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82305e4
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To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss between oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently.
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Virginia Woolf |
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eac90aa
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What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever.
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reading
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Virginia Woolf |
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0fed880
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No guinea of earned money should go to rebuilding the college on the old plan just as certainly none could be spent upon building a college upon a new plan: therefore the guinea should be earmarked "Rags. Petrol. Matches." And this note should be attached to it. "Take this guinea and with it burn the college to the ground. Set fire to the old hypocrisies. Let the light of the burning building scare the nightingales and incarnadine the willo..
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women
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Virginia Woolf |
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0899bf6
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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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Virginia Woolf |
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0031495
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I live; I die; the sea comes over me; it's the blue that lasts.
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Virginia Woolf |
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e4d6954
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His eyes were bright, and, indeed, he scarcely knew whether they held dreams or realities...and in five minutes she had filled the shell of the old dream with the flesh of life...
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Virginia Woolf |
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96f1966
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Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes.
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independence
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Virginia Woolf |
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d29a202
|
I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it.
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Virginia Woolf |
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0299ad0
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I have had my vision.
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Virginia Woolf |
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b1c3840
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Death is woven in with the violets," said Louis. "Death and again death.")" --
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violets
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Virginia Woolf |
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25402be
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Well, I really don't advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married.
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Virginia Woolf |
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a2ae3b4
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I exist only in the soles of my feet and in the tired muscles of my thighs. We have been walking for hours it seems. But where? I cannot remember.
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the-waves
narrator
personal
virginia-woolf
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Virginia Woolf |
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41ad358
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The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.
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Virginia Woolf |
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a9861b9
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Tragedies come in the hungry hours.
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Virginia Woolf |
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db6f70e
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But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave.
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Virginia Woolf |
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cc8b903
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All the time she writing the world had continued.
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Virginia Woolf |
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741f5ff
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I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doi..
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Virginia Woolf |
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0fdd621
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Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.
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letters
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Virginia Woolf |
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3afd685
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It is as if Emily Bronte could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality.
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Virginia Woolf |
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911829d
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What could be more absurd? Yet it is nature's folly, not ours. When she set about her chief masterpiece, the making of man, she should have thought of one thing only. Instead, turning her head, looking over her shoulder, into each one of us she let creep instincts and desires which are utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture; the colours have run. Is the true self this which stands on t..
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Virginia Woolf |
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36bdddd
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Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put their faces in front of, the actual thing; often overpowering the solitary traveller and taking away from him the sense of the earth, the wish to return, and giving him for substitute a general peace, as if (so he thinks as he advances down the forest ride) all this fever of living were simplicity itself; and myriads of things merged in one thing; and this figure, made of sky..
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Virginia Woolf |
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8de6de7
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Mr Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.
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Virginia Woolf |
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a45f194
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There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room.
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Virginia Woolf |
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e4319ec
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There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.
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philosophical
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Virginia Woolf |
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071dd7c
|
She seemed a compound of the autumn leaves and the winter sunshine ...
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winter
woman
night-and-day
virginia-woolf
|
Virginia Woolf |
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abb9190
|
Empty, empty, empty; silent, silent, silent. The room was a shell, singing of what was before time was; a vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold, holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence.
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Virginia Woolf |
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764f2d1
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Like a long wave, like a roll of heavy waters, he went over me, his devastating presence--dragging me open, laying bare the pebbles on the shore of my soul.
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Virginia Woolf |
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c88126b
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I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me , here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends.
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Virginia Woolf |
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34f7935
|
Wind and storm colored July. Also, in the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather. I was wafted down tunnels. Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. I laid my hand against a brick wall. I returned very painfully, drawing myself ba..
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Virginia Woolf |