“You have been reading Byron. You have been marking the passages that seem to approve of your own character. I find marks… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.... the essay must be pure--pure like water or pure like… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Literature had taken possession even of her memories. She was matching him, presumably, with certain characters in the old novels...” — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“At any rate, where books are concerned, it is notoriously difficult to fix labels of merit in such a way that they… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“We are all women you assure me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these –… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Sometimes it seems to me that I shall never write out all the books I have in my head, because of the… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant,… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters,… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“As for the other experiences, the solitary ones, which people go through alone, in their bedrooms, in their offices, walking the fields… — 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… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“My great adventure is really Proust. Well-- what remains to be written after that? I’m only in the first volume, and there… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women” — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice.” — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“And is there any reason, we ask as we shut the book, why the perspective that a plain earthenware pot exacts should… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“And if literature is not the Bride and Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? 'Confound it all.' he cried, 'why say Bedfellow… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“In your modesty you seem to consider that writers are of different blood and bone from yourselves; that they know more of… — 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
