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Virginia Woolf Quotes about Character

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Like all very handsome men who die tragically, he left not so much a character behind him as a legend. Youth and death shed a halo through which it is difficult to see a real face.

Like all very handsome men who die tragically, he left not so much a character behind him as a legend. Youth and death shed a halo through which it is difficult to see a real face.

Virginia Woolf
Real, Character, Men
Virginia Woolf (2017). “Moments Of Being”, p.100, Random House

We read Charlotte Bronte not for exquisite observation of character - her characters are vigorous and elementary; not for comedy - hers is grim and crude; not for a philosophic view of life - hers is that of a country parson's daughter; but for her poetry. Probably that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering personality, so that, as we say in real life, they have only to open the door to make themselves felt.

Virginia Woolf
War, Character, Doors
"The Common Reader: First series".

On or about December 1910, human character changed.

Virginia Woolf
Character, December, Changed
Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.38, Oxford University Press

All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the general mind which they interpret and indeed almost discover, so that we come to read them rather for that than for any story or character or scene of seperate excellence.

Virginia Woolf
Character, Atmosphere, Mind
Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.2982, Delphi Classics

King old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always to to a good man, they say.

Virginia Woolf
Kings, Character, Cat

Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.

Virginia Woolf
Kindness, Character, Charity
Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.89, Broadview Press

Talents of the novelist: ... observation of character, analysis of emotion, people's feelings, personal relations.

Virginia Woolf
Character, People, Feelings

But the novels of women were not affected only by the necessarily narrow range of the writer's experience. They showed, at least in the nineteenth century, another characteristic which may be traced to the writer's sex. In Middlemarch and in Jane Eyre we are conscious not merely of the writer's character, as we are conscious of the character of Charles Dickens, but we are conscious of a woman's presence of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights.

Virginia Woolf
Sex, Character, Rights
Virginia Woolf (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.245, OUP Oxford

That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way--that is what we look to you to do now.

Virginia Woolf
Character, Mean, Thinking
Virginia Woolf (1932). “A Letter to a Young Poet”

As a creator of character his peculiarity is that he creates wherever his eyes rest ... With such a power at his command Dickens made his books blaze up, not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people upon the fire.

Virginia Woolf
Book, Character, Eye
Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3106, Delphi Classics

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