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"The whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string."
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"Miracles focused gospel teaches us to be selfish and egocentric."

"Oh, mankind, race of crocodiles! How well I recognize you down there, and how worthy you are of yourselves!"

"If [literature] should turn into pure propaganda or pure entertainment, society will slip back into the sty of the immediate -- which is to say, the memoryless existence of hymenoptera and gastropods. None of this is so important, to be sure. The world can get by nicely without literature. But without human beings it can get by better yet."

"Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history."

"If the self-help books worked, it would be a shrinking industry not a growing one."

"Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity."

"God of blind believers is most likely to be cock-eyed."
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."


"This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room."
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