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"Indeed, she had the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance; finally for an attitude towards herself which no woman could fail to feel or to find agreeable, something trustful, childlike, reverential; which an old woman could take from a young man without loss of dignity, and woe betide the girl, pray Heaven it was none of her daughters! who did not feel the worth of it, and all that it implied, to the marrow of her bones!"
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"Oleanders have attractive flowers, they decorate nature beautifully, but they are poisonous; and a woman is an oleander; it's all right to watch her once in a while, but then you must walk away without touching her; if you ever try to taste her even once, you'll head for hell!"

"Most often women want happiness and men want wilderness."

"When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women."

"Men as a class appear to be 'at risk, ' maybe even at high risk."

"And a woman by herself is missing a man, while a man by himself is his own master. Trousers. That's the secret. Trousers and a pair of socks. I never dreamed it was like this. Put on trousers and the world changes. We walk different. We act different. I see these girls and I think: Idiot's Get yourself some trousers!"

"Women are binding and men are commanding."

"I'll never forget the first time Davram took me by the scruff of my neck and showed me he was the stronger of us. It was magnificent! If a woman is stronger than her husband, she comes to despise him. She has the choice of either tyrannizing him or else making herself less in order not to make him less. If the husband is strong enough, though, she can be as strong as she is, as strong as she can grow to be."

"Women often forget that the man she is complaining about is a creation of a mother like her."

"You see only the cat's paw, Signor Tartini, whereas I see the sharp claws hidden in that paw!.. Women are like fire; they warm you from afar, and when you enter into them they burn you to ashes!"
Explore more quotes by Virginia Woolf


"There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking."


"The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity."


"The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own."


"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."


"Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say."


"Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?"


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