“And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
I got out this diary and read, as one always reads one's own writing; with a kind of guilty intensity. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“One must own that there are certain books which can be read without the mind and without the heart, but still with… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“being an artist: "And this susceptibility of theirs is doubly unfortunate , I thought, returning again to my original enquiry into what… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“She had thought of literature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse) as something wild as… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.” — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“He bethought him with pride that he had always been called a scholar, and sneered at for his love of solitude and… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Consider how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down,… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“The train slows and lengthens, as we approach London, the centre, and my heart draws out too, in fear, in exaltation. I am about… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword. On one side all is correct, definite, orderly; the paths… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Other worshipful objects were content with worship; men, women, God, all let one kneel prostrate; but this form, were it only the shape of… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Sometimes he woke with a brain like lead; at others it was as if a thousand wax tapers were alight and people were throwing… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life -… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Love ought to stop on both sides, don’t you think, simultaneously?’ He spoke without any stress on the words, so as not to wake… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to talk. To follow the… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! (...) I think I could happily live here & read forever.” — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
