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…pleased with themselves, but so well pleased with the world that their vanity might be forgiven them.
Virginia Woolf on friends of her brother Thoby’s, before they went off to university. Afterwards, she says, they are “not less impressed with their own abilities indeed, but that is the last illusion that is left to them. The things they found pleasing, please them no longer; they neither play nor work. They fail to pass their Examinations, because they say, that success is a failure & they despise success.”
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