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"It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on."
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"We are all artists, painting the world with our thoughts while coloring the universe with our deeds."

"My pond life with hydra is over, now I'm into the ocean world of poetry to dive deeper.."

"I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it."

"What may be myth in one world may always be fact in some other."

"One's writing is good only when the intelligence and the imagination are in equilibrium. As soon as one of them overbalances the other, it's all up; you may as well throw it away and begin afresh."

"Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other."

"You would be amazed by how I can torture the English language. I am an abusive lover."

"Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination."
Explore more quotes by Virginia Woolf


"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."


"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."


"This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say."


"Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."


"The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers."


"A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out."


"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."


"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. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent."
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