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Virginia Woolf Quotes

Total quotes (161)

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Birthname

AKA Virginia Woolf

Birthday January 25, 1882

Birthplace United Kingdom

Death March 28, 1941

Manner of Death Suicide, 13 June 2012 Iraq Attacks

Educated At King's College London

Nationality British, United Kingdom Of Great Britain And Ireland, United Kingdom

Occupations Essayist, Short Story Writer, Feminist, Autobiographer, Diarist

Spouse Leonard Sidney Woolf

Total quotes (161)

What matters is precisely this; the unspoken at the edge of the spoken.

— Virginia Woolf, via GoodReads

unspoken spoken Unsaid Things Unsaid Feelings Feelings Communication

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I want to write a novel about silence. The things people don’t say.

— Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

Silence Writing novel

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Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

— Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting

Books Novels Secondhand library Oldness

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The truth is that I am not one of those who find their satisfaction in one person, or in infinity.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

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The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went.

— Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Sad Cycles of Love

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I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.

— Virginia Woolf, Diary of Virginia Woolf Vol. 1

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I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

— Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being

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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, The Years

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I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn. I cannot be tossed about, or float gently, or mix with other people.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Seasons changing as times change Feelings emotions Self & Identity special snowflake Sensitivity self awareness Self Construction

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My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.

— Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

Anxiety what anxiety feels like anxiety in literature Mind mindfulness Examples of Similes

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I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything.

— Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

Love inspiration Reality

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They were in love, happy, content; but why was it so painful being in love, why was there so much pain in happiness?

— Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)

Love Happiness Contentment Pain hurt

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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 or admires her understanding.

— Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography

Dating Respect Love

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How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?

— Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays

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What does the brain matter compared with the heart?

— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

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I feel insignificant, lost, but exultant.

— Virginia Woolf, Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)

Deep Feelings Ironic

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They went in and out of each other’s minds without any effort.

— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Thinking of Someone Relationships Love

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Thinking is my fighting.

— Virginia Woolf, Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid

Thinking Mind Intelligence strength

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Be truthful, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting.

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Honesty Positive Trait Motivational Quote

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But with you I am deeply passionately, unrequitedly in love.

— Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings (The Cutting Edge: Lesbian Life and Literature Series)

Passionate Love One Sided Love Romantic Literature

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People are–nothing more.

— Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out: By Virginia Woolf - Illustrated

Society People We Me Meet

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It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.

— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

expressing feelings Feelings expression

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I wish you’d find the exit out of my head.

— Virginia Woolf, Letter to Vita Sackville-West,’ November 22, 1933

Hope Desire Thoughts Thinking Love

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The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

— Virginia Woolf, A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction

Eyes Thoughts Metaphor Prison

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It becomes clear that I am not one and simple, but complex and many.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

complex Complicated Personality Paradox

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Some people go to priests, others to poetry, I to my friends.

— Virginia Woolf, Selected Works Of Virginia Woolf

Friendship Friends

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My heart currently resembles the ashes of my cigarettes.

— Virginia Woolf, I Am In The Mood To Dissolve In The Sky

heart Cigarettes Nicotine Broken Heart Heart Break Pain

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I like observing people. I like looking at things.

— Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)

Observant curious interested

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My boldness terrifies me.

— Virginia Woolf, Walking Virginia Woolf’s London: An Investigation in Literary Geography

strength boldness Bravery Courage

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My imagination tells lies, too.

— Virginia Woolf, Selected Diaries

Imagination Reality Lie

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I think you understand better than most people.

— Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

Understanding Compatibility Comfortability

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I want everything – love, adventure, intimacy, work.

— Virginia Woolf, Letter to Leonard Woolf

Love Desire Intimacy Work Adventure

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I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky.

— Virginia Woolf, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath

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I think it is likely that the best of everything is made in solitude.

— Virginia Woolf, Selected Works Of Virginia Woolf

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No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Be yourself Chill Impressing Others

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Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I’m never not thinking of you.

— Virginia Woolf, Selected Letters

Love Literature I Miss You LDR

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She is rather like the winter sun–her ruddy edges slightly blurred.

— Virginia Woolf, The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf; Selected Diaries

Wild Child Nature

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I am like the foam that races over the beach or the moonlight that falls arrow-like here on a tin can, here on a spike of the mailed sea holly, or a bone or a half-eaten boat.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Ocean Examples of Similes

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It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it.

— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Terror of Love Intensity of Feeling Feeling Too Much

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One's children so often gave one's own perceptions a little thrust forwards.

— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Family kids Children

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I need solitude. I need space. I need air. I need the empty fields round me; and my legs pounding along roads; and sleep; and animal existence.

— Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf

desires Needs and Wants Tired

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Do you realise how devoted I am to you, all the same? There's nothing I wouldn't do for you, dearest Honey.

— Virginia Woolf, The letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3

Love romance love & devotion Loving Deeply

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But I do adore you — every part of you from heel to hair. Never will you shake me off, try as you may.

— Virginia Woolf, The letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3

Love Confession of Feelings Adolesence admiration Attraction

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You have been in every way all that anyone could be...If anybody could have saved me it would have been you.

— Virginia Woolf, Afterwords: Letters on the Death of Virginia Woolf

Love letter to a lover Lover letter farewell letter Farewell goodbye Parting Ways

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How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it.

— Virginia Woolf, The Mark on the Wall

Analogies When The Muses Come Intoxication Anthropomorphic Metaphors List: Anthropomorphic Metaphors

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You’re the only person I’ve ever met who seems to have the faintest conception of what I mean when I say a thing.

— Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

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Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

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‘The flower,’ said Bernard, ‘the red carnation that stood in the vase on the table of the restaurant when we dined together with Percival, is become a six-sided flower; made of six lives.’

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

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

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

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If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

— Virginia Woolf, The Moment and Other Essays

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For I am more selves than Neville thinks. We are not simple as our friends would have us to meet their needs. Yet love is simple.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

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It is strange that we who are capable of so much suffering should inflict so much suffering.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

asshole Suffering Cruelty Hate humanity

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By virtue of her pen she has won her freedom. She ranges the world, free like any other human being to laugh, to scold, to say what she likes, to be what she is.

— Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays

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Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.

— Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

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I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.

— Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

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A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.

— Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

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The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

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Directly the mulberry tree begins to make you circle, break off. Pelt the tree with laughter.

— Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

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It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

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Lord, how utterly disgusting life is! What dirty tricks it plays us, one moment free; the next, this.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Life depressed Tired

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For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying–what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must simply say what one felt.

— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Impressing Others Honesty Be Real

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It is true that the surface may have some connection with the depths, but if we are to help you to prevent war we must try to penetrate deeper beneath the skin.

— Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

Surface Stop War

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Tears rose slowly in her eyes and stood there, brimming but contained. The tears of some profound emotion, happiness, grief, renunciation; an emotion so complex in its nature that to express it was impossible.

— Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

Tears Crying The Meaning of Tears

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It seemed to her that there was something amateurish in bringing romantic love into touch with a perfectly straightforward friendship.

— Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

Marriage Love Friendship

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I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

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I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.

— Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

An Introverted Mind

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She would not say of any one in the world that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on.

— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Existential Crisis Midlife Crisis Tired Sensitive People

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Mrs Swithin took her knitting from the table. 'Did you feel,' she asked, 'what he said: we act different parts but are the same?'

— Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

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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, A Room of One's Own

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Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

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Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

— Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader

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I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Fluid Identity Who Calls When I Say I?Always Shifting

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A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

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'That was the burden,' she mused, 'laid on me in the cradle; murmured by waves; breathed by restless elm trees; crooned by singing women; what we must rememeber; what we would forget.'

— Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

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

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

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But look—he flicks his hand to the back of his neck. For such gesture one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

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The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

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Theirs, too, is the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.

— Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader

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Words rose above the intolerably laden dumb oxen plodding through the mud. Words without meaning - wonderful words.

— Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

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Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Writing Writers

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–in other words, how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one’s kind.

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Happiness Satisfaction

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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!

— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Read In Your 20s

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Oh, this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. Now my body thaws; I am unsealed, I am incandescent.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

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Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then—our friends are not able to finish their stories.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

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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, The Waves

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The merest schoolgirl [school girl,] when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer [try to] describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.

— Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

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Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.

— Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

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She alone spoke the truth; to her alone could he speak it. That was the source of her everlasting attraction for him, perhaps; she was a person to whom one could say what came into one's head.

— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

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You are not listening to me. You are making phrases about Byron. And while you gesticulate, with your cloak, your cane, I am trying to expose a secret told to nobody yet; I am asking you (as I stand with my back to you) to take my life in your hands and tell me whether I am doomed always to cause repulsion in those I love?

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

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My mind is so impatient, so quick, in some ways so desperate.

— Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

Creativity Passion

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Everything is strange. Things are huge and very small.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

strange Strangeness World the world is strange

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Let us enjoy what we do enjoy.

— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Go With Flow Mind Your Own Business You Do You

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I feel like more and more I come to loathe any dominion of one over another; any leadership, any imposition of the will. Is it chiefly intellectual snobbery that makes me dislike most people? I don’t know. I know that I am full of anger.

— Virginia Woolf, Diary

Anger Free Spirit Loner I Hate People

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People have no meaning to her. She has no answer for them.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

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What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.

— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Life Existential Crisis Perspective

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The flowers flashed before they faded. She watched them flash.

— Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

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Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody.

— Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

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Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

— Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

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The artist after all is a solitary being.

— Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

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I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.

— Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography

Reinvent Yourself reinvention Tired Existential Crisis

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