Literature Quotes by Virginia Woolf

The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.

— Virginia Woolf

“It has the permanent quality of literature.”

— Virginia Woolf

literature is the record of our discontent.

— Virginia Woolf

And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.

— Virginia Woolf

That complete statement which is literature.

— Virginia Woolf

“the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string”

— Virginia Woolf

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.

— Virginia Woolf

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

“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”

— Virginia Woolf

“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

“...to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself.”

— Virginia Woolf

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others

— Virginia Woolf

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

— Virginia Woolf

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together…

— Virginia Woolf

A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many…

— Virginia Woolf

“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

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

— Virginia Woolf

“I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the…

— Virginia Woolf

“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

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of…

— Virginia Woolf

“Orlando was unaccountably disappointed. She had thought of literature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse)…

— 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

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

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

— Virginia Woolf

The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the…

— Virginia Woolf

“Clarissa had a theory in those days - they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to…

— Virginia Woolf

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature.…

— Virginia Woolf

“Shakespeare could not have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and…

— Virginia Woolf

Mr. Beerbohm in his way is perfect ... He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and…

— Virginia Woolf

“She had thought of literature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse) as something wild as…

— 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

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

— Virginia Woolf

“The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts,…

— Virginia Woolf

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease…

— Virginia Woolf

“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

“I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love;…

— Virginia Woolf

“To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read,…

— Virginia Woolf