Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
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Orlando: A Biography

By Virginia Woolf

A feminist classic based on the life of Woolf's cross-dressing lover, the aristocratic author Vita Sackville-West; Orlando reviews and critiques the history of English literature through the eyes of a poet who lives for centuries and changes sex. Touching on timeless themes, it became popular as a novel, a play, a film, and the source for many scholastic works; the book experimented and expanded into new forms of writing, became one of the most famous works in the history of women's writing, and sparked controversies that still rage today. Transcending gender, time, and sexual orientation; this insightful story examines 300 years of history from a delightfully liberated-from-prejudice perspective.

Quotes from Orlando: A Biography

“A silly song of Shakespeare’s has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world.”

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“If it meant conventionality, meant slavery, meant deceit, meant denying her love, fettering her limbs, pursing her lips, and restraining her tongue, then she would turn about with the ship and set sail once more for the gypsies.”

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“if one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts.”

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Themes: Marriage

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“No time, no devotion, can be too great, therefore, which makes the vehicle of our message less distorting. We must shape our words till they are the thinnest integument for our thoughts [and] Thoughts are divine.”

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“Nothing can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker's.”

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“She could feel herself poisoned through and through, and was forced at length to consider the most desperate of remedies, which was to yield completely and submissively to the spirit of the age, and take a husband.”

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Themes: Marriage

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“The ear is the antechamber to the soul and poetry can adulterate more surely than lust or gunpowder. The poet’s then is the highest office of all, His words reach where others fall short”

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Themes: Poetry

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“The thought struck him like a bullet. Ambition dropped like a plummet. Rid of the heart-burn of rejected love and all the other stings and pricks of life’s nettle-bed his ambitions had burnt upon him, he opened his eyes which had been wide open all the time but had seen only thoughts.”

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Themes: Ambition Wu Wei

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“the words went dancing and circling like wild hawks together among the belfries and higher and higher, further and further, faster and faster, they circled, till they crashed and fell in a shower of fragments to the ground”

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“Those who prohibit; those who deny; those who reverence without knowing why; the tribe of respectable who prefer not to see… This is no place for us here.”

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“What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice… what could be more secret, more slow, and like the intercourse of lovers?”

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Themes: Poetry Fame

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“What more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side, the future on another.”

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Themes: Here and Now Time

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“While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a person like a mist. Dark, ample and free, obscurity lets the mind make its way unimpeded. They alone are free, they alone are truthful, they alone are at peace.”

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