Book Quotes by Virginia Woolf

I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure.

— Virginia Woolf

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

— Virginia Woolf

I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.

— Virginia Woolf

For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.

— Virginia Woolf

“... a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades…

— Virginia Woolf

When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.

— 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

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

— Virginia Woolf

I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies…

— Virginia Woolf

People only become writers if they can't find the one book they've always wanted to read.

— Virginia Woolf

Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.

— Virginia Woolf

As a creator of character his peculiarity is that he creates wherever his eyes rest ... With such a power at his…

— Virginia Woolf

They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot…

— Virginia Woolf

I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a…

— Virginia Woolf

Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the…

— 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

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

— 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

Does housekeeping interest you at all? I think it really ought to be just as good as writing and I never see…

— Virginia Woolf

Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working…

— Virginia Woolf

It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down…

— Virginia Woolf

Walden - all his books, indeed - are packed with subtle, conflicting, and very fruitful discoveries. They are not written to prove…

— 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

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

For some time she observed a great yellow butterfly, which was opening and closing its wings very slowly on a little flat…

— Virginia Woolf

“And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it…

— Virginia Woolf

a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy.…

— Virginia Woolf

...so now, Mrs. Ramsay thought, she could return to that dream land, that unreal but fascinating place, the Manning's drawing-room at Marlow…

— Virginia Woolf

A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which…

— Virginia Woolf

“There it lay in the early sunshine of spring. It looked a town rather than a house, but a town built, not…

— Virginia Woolf

Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades…

— Virginia Woolf

Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.

— 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

Books should stand on their own feet ... If they need shoring up by a preface here, an introduction there, they have…

— Virginia Woolf

“What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked…

— Virginia Woolf

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with…

— Virginia Woolf

“She liked getting hold of some book... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning…

— Virginia Woolf

Why does one write these books after all? The drudgery, the misery, the grind, are forgotten everytime; and one launches another, and…

— Virginia Woolf