But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind.” It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Anthony and Cleopatra, poems lovelier than the ' Ode to a Nightingale,' novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. But can we use them? No, because words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. Yet there is the dictionary there at our disposal are some half-a-million words all in alphabetical order. If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of emotion when we most need words we find none. But words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. “Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. “Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends could only read the title.” To gallop intemperately fall on the sand tired out to feel the earth spin to have-positively-a rush of friendship for stones and grasses, as if humanity were over, and as for men and women, let them go hang-there is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes us pretty often.” “Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.
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From The Common Reader, Second Series (1935) 17. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions-there we have none.”
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To admit authorities … into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Each must decide that question for himself. “The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever.” “At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Different people draw different words from me.” “When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?” But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its color, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery.” “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. From her diary ( entry dated October 2, 1932) 12. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.” “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” George Charles Beresford, Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain “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.”Ī photo of author Virginia Woolf, who was famous for writing To The Lighthouse and Orlando. From her anti-war essay " Three Guineas" (1938) 9. “Let us never cease from thinking-what is this ‘civilization’ in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them?” From her 1929 essay " A Room of One’s Own" 8. “Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.” “As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.” From The Moment and Other Essays (1947) 6. “If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.” An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second.” The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. “Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. From the essay collection The Common Reader, First Series (1925) 4. “Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.” From her 1928 novel, Orlando: A Biography 3. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.” “Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Said to an acquaintance, Nigel Nicholson, who later became a successful publisher, memoirist, and politician 2. “Nothing has really happened until it has been described.” We've picked 21 lines that rank among her all-time best-which is no easy feat. She dissected every topic, from the idiocy of warfare to the joys of sex. Born on January 25, 1882, Virginia Woolf was a true writer’s writer.