Books Quotes by Virginia Woolf

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.

— Virginia Woolf

writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.

— Virginia Woolf

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

— Virginia Woolf

“It has the permanent quality of literature.”

— Virginia Woolf

literature is the record of our discontent.

— Virginia Woolf

“Books, she thought, grew of themselves.”

— Virginia Woolf

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.

— Virginia Woolf

That complete statement which is literature.

— Virginia Woolf

I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity.

— Virginia Woolf

“Oh, yes, dear reader: the essay is alive. There is no reason to despair.”

— Virginia Woolf

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can…

— Virginia Woolf

“Literature had taken possession even of her memories. She was matching him, presumably, with certain characters in the old novels...”

— Virginia Woolf

I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.

— Virginia Woolf

I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.

— Virginia Woolf

“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”

— Virginia Woolf

It's the writing, not the being read, that excites me. Joy is in the doing.

— Virginia Woolf

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of…

— Virginia Woolf

The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading.…

— Virginia Woolf

I do think all good and evil comes from words. I have to tune myself into a good temper with something musical,…

— Virginia Woolf

“It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to talk. To…

— Virginia Woolf

Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known…

— Virginia Woolf

Thus Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Douglas and Mr. Joyce partly spoil their books for women readers by their display of self-conscious virility; and…

— Virginia Woolf

“People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more then they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some…

— Virginia Woolf

“I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the…

— Virginia Woolf

“Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which…

— Virginia Woolf

If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people…

— Virginia Woolf

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking…

— Virginia Woolf

“Orlando was unaccountably disappointed. She had thought of literature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse)…

— Virginia Woolf

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature.…

— Virginia Woolf

“Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men,…

— Virginia Woolf

“And somehow or other, the windows being open, and the book held so that it rested upon a background of escallonia hedges…

— Virginia Woolf

“And is there any reason, we ask as we shut the book, why the perspective that a plain earthenware pot exacts should…

— Virginia Woolf

“It was better to die, like Eugénie and Digby, in the prime of life with all one's faculties about one. But he…

— Virginia Woolf

“One holds every phrase, every scene to the light as one reads - for Nature seems, very oddly, to have provided us…

— Virginia Woolf

“If it is true that there are books written to escape from the present moment, and its meanness and its sordidity, it…

— Virginia Woolf

“We are all women you assure me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these –…

— Virginia Woolf

“...Orlando, to whom fortune had given every gift--plate, linen, houses, men-servants, carpets, beds in profusion--had only to open a book for the…

— Virginia Woolf

“Consider how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down,…

— Virginia Woolf

“One could not but play for a moment with the thought of what might have happened if Charlotte Brontë had possessed say…

— Virginia Woolf

“Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like…

— Virginia Woolf