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Virginia Woolf

English author whose work used such techniques as stream of consciousness and the interior monologue; prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group (1882-1941)

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Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

– Virginia Woolf

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I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.

– Virginia Woolf

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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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It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

– Virginia Woolf

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Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

– Virginia Woolf

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Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul.

– Virginia Woolf

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You can not gain peace by avoiding life.

– Virginia Woolf

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Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.

– Virginia Woolf

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As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

– Virginia Woolf

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“She did not want to move, or to speak. She wanted to rest, to lean, to dream. She felt very tired.”

– Virginia Woolf

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Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is very opposite of what it is above.

– Virginia Woolf

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I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

– Virginia Woolf

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If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.

– Virginia Woolf

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If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or our country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share.

– Virginia Woolf

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It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is, and if an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater service to humanity; and we should have the immense pleasure into the bargain of watching Professor X rush for his measuring-rods to prove himself superior.

– Virginia Woolf

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Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

– Virginia Woolf

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Publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it.

– Virginia Woolf

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The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

– Virginia Woolf

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We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.

– Virginia Woolf

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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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When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.

– Virginia Woolf

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When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?

– Virginia Woolf

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Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size.

– Virginia Woolf

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