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To sit and contemplate - to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where and what you are.

Virginia Woolf

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Virginia Woolf
Age: 59 †
Born: 1882
Born: January 25
Died: 1941
Died: March 28
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Feminist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Publisher
Short Story Writer
Writer
London
England
Virxhinia Ulf
Virginia yo juanito Adeline Woolf
Virg̔inyah Vold
Virdžiniâ Vulf
Virdzhiniia Vulf
Virzhinia Ulf
Virginia Stephen
Virzhin︠iia Ulf
Adeline Virginia Stephen
Virginyah Volf
Adeline Virginia Woolf
Virginia Adeline Woolf
Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf
Birtzinia Gulph
Virginia Stephen Woolf
Woolf
Virginia
1882-1941
Without
Deeds
Great
Everywhere
Men
Remain
Contemplate
Faces
Contemplating
Desire
Pleased
Remember
Sympathy
Women
Envy
Everything
Content

More quotes by Virginia Woolf

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Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?
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I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.
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To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!
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I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me what would you answer?
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Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.
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Safe! safe! safe!' the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry 'Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.
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To know whom to write for is to know how to write.
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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!
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The cold stream of visual impressions failed him now as if the eye were a cup that overflowed and let the rest run down its china walls unrecorded.
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For we think back through our mothers if we are women.
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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 doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together
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A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.
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It is as if Emily Brontë 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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Still, life had a way of adding day to day
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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.
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It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
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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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The compensation of growing old ... was simply this that the passion remains as strong as ever, but one has gained -- at last! -- the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence -- the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.
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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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Of the rest some we know to be dead though they walk among us some are not yet born though they go through the forms of life others are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six.
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