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If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.

Virginia Woolf
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If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?
Virginia Woolf
It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.
Virginia Woolf
I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.
Virginia Woolf
Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.
Virginia Woolf
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.
Virginia Woolf
My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?
Virginia Woolf
The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.
Virginia Woolf
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Virginia Woolf
The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.
Virginia Woolf
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.
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.
Virginia Woolf
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.
Virginia Woolf
One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.
Virginia Woolf
Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.
Virginia Woolf
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
Virginia Woolf
Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
Virginia Woolf
One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
Virginia Woolf
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
Virginia Woolf
These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.
Virginia Woolf
Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
Virginia Woolf
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Virginia Woolf
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
Virginia Woolf
This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.
Virginia Woolf
The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.
Virginia Woolf
To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.
Virginia Woolf
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.
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.
Virginia Woolf
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
Virginia Woolf
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
Virginia Woolf
Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
Virginia Woolf
Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
Virginia Woolf
Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
Virginia Woolf
It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
Virginia Woolf
Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?
Virginia Woolf
It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.
Virginia Woolf
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
Virginia Woolf
Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.
Virginia Woolf
I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.
Virginia Woolf
When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
Virginia Woolf
Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
Virginia Woolf
If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?
Virginia Woolf
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.
Virginia Woolf
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
Virginia Woolf
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
Virginia Woolf
I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.
Virginia Woolf
To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
Virginia Woolf
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
Virginia Woolf
We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.
Virginia Woolf