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Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Quotes

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Famous Virginia Woolf Quotes

“I always have such need to merely talk to you. Even when I have nothing to talk about – with you I just seem to go right ahead and sort of invent it. I invent it for you. Because I never seem to run out of tenderness for you and because I need to feel you near. Excuse the bad writing and excuse the emotional overflow. What I mean to say, perhaps, is that, in a way, I am never empty of you; not for a moment, an instant, a single second.”

Letters
Author:Virginia Woolf
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“I enjoyed your intimate letter from the Dolomites. It gave me a great deal of pain – which is I've no doubt the first stage of intimacy – no friends, no heart, only an indifferent head. Never mind: I enjoyed your abuse very much [...] But I will not go on else I should write you a really intimate letter, and then you would dislike me, more, even more, than you do.”

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Author:Virginia Woolf
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“I've just stopped talking to you. It seems so strange. It's perfectly peaceful here--they're playing bowls--I'd just put flowers in your room. And there you sit with the bombs falling around you. What can one say-- except that I love you and I've got to live through this strange quiet evening thinking of you sitting there alone. Dearest-- let me have a line... You have given me such happiness...”

LettersVirginia WoolfVita Sackville West
Book:The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. Five: 1932-1935
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“Let us consider letters - how they come at breakfast, and at night, with their yellow stamps and their green stamps, immortalized by the postmark - for to see one's own envelope on another's table is to realize how soon deeds sever and become alien. Then at last the power of the mind to quit the body is manifest, and perhaps we fear or hate or wish annihilated this phantom of ourselves, lying on the table. Still, there are letters that merely say how dinner's at seven; others ordering coal; making appointments. The hand in them is scarcely perceptible, let alone the voice or the scowl. Ah, but when the post knocks and the letter comes always the miracle seems repeated - speech attempted. Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.”

LettersCorrespondence
Book:Jacob's Room
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“Do you know it was four weeks yesterday that you went? Yes, I often think of you, instead of my novel; I want to take you over the water meadows in the summer on foot, I have thought of many million things to tell you. Devil that you are, to vanish to Persia and leave me here! [...] And, dearest Vita, we are having two water-closets made, one paid for by Mrs Dalloway, the other by The Common Reader: both dedicated to you.”

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Author:Virginia Woolf
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“For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? --some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning--indeed they did.”

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Book:The Collected Novels of Virginia Woolf - Volume II - Between the Acts, Mrs Dalloway, Orlando
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“We are about to part," said Neville. "Here are the boxes; here are the cabs. There is Percival in his billycock hat. He will forget me. He will leave my letters lying about among guns and dogs unaswered. I shall send him poems and he will perhaps reply with a picture post card. But it is for that that I love him. I shall propose a meeting - under a clock, by some Cross; and shall wait and he will not come. It is for that that I love him.”

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Book:Selected Works of Virginia Woolf
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“Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost. Life would split asunder without them. 'Come to tea, come to dinner, what's the truth of the story? have you heard the news? life in the capital is wonderful; the Russian dancers....' These are our stays and props. These lace our days together and make of life a perfect globe.”

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Author:Virginia Woolf
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