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There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.... the essay must be pure--pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.

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
Pure
Impurities
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Water
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One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
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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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Whenever you see a board up with Trespassers will be prosecuted, trespass at once.
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It is the duty of the writer to describe.
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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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The weight of the world is on our shoulders, its vision is through our eyes if we blink or look aside, or turn back to finger what Plato said or remember Napoleon and his conquests, we inflict on the world the injury of some obliquity. This is life.
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There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.
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Thus Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Douglas and Mr. Joyce partly spoil their books for women readers by their display of self-conscious virility and Mr. Hemingway, but much less violently, follows suit.
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Books should stand on their own feet ... If they need shoring up by a preface here, an introduction there, they have no more right to exist than a table that needs a wad of paper under one leg in order to stand steady.
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If we didn't live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.
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The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.
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Soup is cuisines kindest course
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My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.
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Her life-that was the only chance she had-the short season between two silences.
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There are moments when one can neither think nor feel, she thought, and if one can neithre feel nor think, where's one?
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I grow numb I grow stiff. How shall I break up this numbness which discredits my sympathetic heart?
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We scarcely wish to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.
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No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
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A good essay must have this permanent quality about it it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
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Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.
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