“She would not say of any one in the world that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature.… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“... a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
To stand in a great bookshop crammed with books so new that their pages almost stick together, and the gilt on their… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“University lectures are an obsolete practice inherited from the Middle Ages when books were scarce. Students should read, not listen. To swallow… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading.… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“...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 Copy Share Image
“Oh, yes, dear reader: the essay is alive. There is no reason to despair.” — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading.… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“No, Charles Tansley would put them both right in a second about books, but it was all so mixed up with, Am… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts,… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Books, she thought, grew of themselves. She never had time to read them. Alas! even the books that had been given her,… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“For the reading of these books seems to perform a curious couching operation on the senses; one sees more intensely afterwards; the… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
But the novels of women were not affected only by the necessarily narrow range of the writer's experience. They showed, at least… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men,… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“She liked getting hold of some book... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading.… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Mr. Beerbohm in his way is perfect ... He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose," she read, and so reading she was ascending, she felt, on to the top,… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Why does one write these books after all? The drudgery, the misery, the grind, are forgotten everytime; and one launches another, and… — 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
