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"For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver."
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"The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice and the desire for personal independence -- these are the features of the Jewish tradition which make me thank my stars that I belong to it."

"Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery."

"In worthy teaching, all things are related."

"It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us."

"Have books 'happened' to you? Unless your answer to that question is 'yes,' I'm unsure how to talk to you."

"Topica from Afar" discusses many topics and ideas. It brings the far ranging to the here and now and it is meant to enlighten and teach those whose minds are open to endless possibilities.Being written as you read."
Explore more quotes by Virginia Woolf


"A woman, she had provoked this horror; a woman, she shouldh ave known how to deal with it. It was immesley to her discredit, sexually, to stand there dumb. One said - what did one say? - Oh, Mr. Ramsay! Dear Mr. Ramsay! That was what that kind old lady who sketched, Mrs. Beckwith, would have said instantly, and rightly. But, no. They stood there, isolated from the rest of the world. His immesnse self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and and spread itself in pools at her feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet."


"How then did it work out, this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking?"


"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible."


"He should be very proud of Andrew if he got a scholarship, he said. She would be just as proud of him if he didn't, she answered. They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did."


"Do you know I get such a passion for reading sometimes its like the other passion -writing- only the wrong side of the carpet."


"If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?"


"Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table-it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket-that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep."


"Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes."


"No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion."
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