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" There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea. "

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" 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. "

Virginia Woolf

Soul

Show

She

" I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write. "

" 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

Quality

Essay

" The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. "

" You cannot find peace by avoiding life. "

" 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. "

" Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title. "

Virginia Woolf

Friends

Past

" Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. "

Virginia Woolf

Poetry

People

" Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them. "

Virginia Woolf

Writing

About

" Arrange whatever pieces come your way. "

" 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. "

" On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points. "

" 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? "

" The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. "

" It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly. "

" 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. "

" The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind. "

Virginia Woolf

Mold

Mind

" 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. "

" Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art. "

" 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. "

" One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph. "

" The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. "

" Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order. "

" 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? "

" 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? "

" 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

Facts

Fact

" I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it. "

" I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. "

" Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works. "

" A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back. "