"Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some ple...
I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.
~ Virginia Woolf ~
Photo by Ákos Szabó
Photo by Ian Turnell
I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.
More Virginia Woolf quotes
"Even the names of the books gave me food for thought.
"When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere b...
"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
"What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. . . . When one so exposes it [in...
"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
"What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not res...
"What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?
"anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.
"Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.
"She liked getting hold of some book... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her t...
"The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glo...
"A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For o...
"For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot an...
"In reading we have to allow the sunken meanings to remain sunken, suggested, not stated; lapsing and flowing into each other like reeds on the bed of ...