Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it — the poets and novelists — can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases… - Virginia Woolf

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Engraved portrait of Virginia Woolf, facing right

Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it — the poets and novelists — can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does no exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma — a mirage.

English
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About Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941), born Adeline Virginia Stephen, was a British writer who is considered to be one of the foremost modernist/feminist literary figures of the twentieth century.

Biography information from Wikiquote · Portrait adapted from Wikimedia Commons (Public domain / CC0)

Also Known As

Birth Name: Adeline Virginia Stephen Adeline Virginia Alexandra Stephen
Alternative Names: Virginia Stephen Adeline Virginia Woolf Virginia Adeline Woolf Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf Virginia Stephen Woolf Adeline Virginia Alexandra Woolf

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Additional quotes by Virginia Woolf

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

Our patience wore rather thin. Visitors do tend to chafe one, though impeccable as friends. L. and I discussed this. He says that with people in the house his hours of positive pleasure are reduced to one; he has I forget how many hours of negative pleasure; and a respectable margin of the acutely unpleasant. Are we growing old?

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