"Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticate...
Books are the mirrors of the soul.
More Virginia Woolf quotes
"Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be tr...
"To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon w...
"The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to...
"Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who, now that the snow has begun to fall and the mountain-top is covered in mist, knows that he must l...
"so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly ...
"…the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea…. It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen w...
"A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he ha...
"This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the...
"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...
"Even the names of the books gave me food for thought.
"Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticate...
"Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
"Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes ...
"For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, ...