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Action(s)
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It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.
-Virginia Woolf
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Adventure
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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.
-Virginia Woolf
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Adversity
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One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
-Virginia Woolf
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Age
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The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
-Virginia Woolf
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Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.
-Virginia Woolf
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At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.
-Virginia Woolf
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These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.
-Virginia Woolf
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Apathy
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Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.
-Virginia Woolf
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Argument & Debate
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When a subject is highly controversial... one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.
-Virginia Woolf
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Aristocracy
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Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.
-Virginia Woolf
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Authors & Writing
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Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.
-Virginia Woolf
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A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
-Virginia Woolf
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Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
-Virginia Woolf
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I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.
-Virginia Woolf
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We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
-Virginia Woolf
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Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.
-Virginia Woolf
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All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point
-Virginia Woolf
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Automobiles
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What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment.
-Virginia Woolf
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Birth
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Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.
-Virginia Woolf
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Books
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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.
-Virginia Woolf
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Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that
-Virginia Woolf
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Boredom
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When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
-Virginia Woolf
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Chance
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I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
-Virginia Woolf
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Charity
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Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
-Virginia Woolf
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City Life, Cities
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As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist, lawyers
-Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (1915)
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Books by and about Virginia Woolf