“the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string” — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“...to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself.” — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered” — 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
Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease… — 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
“I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Orlando was unaccountably disappointed. She had thought of literature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse)… — 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
“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
“The fact about contemporaries is that they're doing the same thing on another railway line: one resents their distracting one, flashing past,… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love;… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read,… — 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
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
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
“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
“Clarissa had a theory in those days - they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to… — 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
“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
“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
“There it lay in the early sunshine of spring. It looked a town rather than a house, but a town built, not… — 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
Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many… — 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 world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life. — 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
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
“She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation,… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Shakespeare could not have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways 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
