Response to a would be biographer in 1980, as quoted in "When Stephen met Sylvia" in The Guardian (24 April 2004) http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1201328,00.html
Context: I am very honoured by your wanting to write a life of me. But the fact is I regard my life as rather a failure in the only thing in which I wanted it to succeed. I have not written the books I ought to have written and I have written a lot of books I should not have written. My life as lived by me has been interesting to me but to write truthfully about it would probably cause much pain to people close to me — and I always feel that the feelings of the living are more important than the monuments of the dead.
“I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.”
Source: The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume One: 1915-1919
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Virginia Woolf 382
English writer 1882–1941Related quotes

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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[At the movie's ending, speaking to the soldiers]
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