Virginia Woolf Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Adventure, Hands

  Virginia Woolf (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.311, OUP Oxford

• It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.

  Virginia Woolf

  Determination, Book, Writing

  Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.37, HMH

• I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Reading, Sound

  Virginia Woolf, Joanne Trautmann Banks (1977). “A change of perspective”, Vintage

• Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Healing, Hands

  Virginia Woolf (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.311, OUP Oxford

• Books are the mirrors of the soul.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Reading, Mirrors

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1835, Delphi Classics

• By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream

  Virginia Woolf

  Dream, Travel, Book

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.630, Wordsworth Editions

• As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Fall, Writing

• I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Reading, Thought Provoking

  "The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1920-1924".

• Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.

  Virginia Woolf

  Friendship, Women, Book

  "Selected Works of Virginia Woolf".

• Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Dark, Squares

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.71, Wordsworth Editions

• This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

  Virginia Woolf

  Peace, War, Women

  A Room of One's Own ch. 4 (1929)

• Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers.

  Virginia Woolf

  Song, Book, Library

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.828, Wordsworth Editions

• They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Mind, Surface

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.626, Wordsworth Editions

• 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 true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, People, Giving

  Georg Brand, Virginia Woolf, Koizumi Yakumo, Hernández Felisberto (2017). “ON READING: Le plaisir de lire”, p.34, Pieffe Edizioni via PublishDrive

• At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.

  Virginia Woolf

  Real, Book, Transition

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.114, Delphi Classics

• For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Judging, Habit

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.612, Wordsworth Editions

• Nothing could be slow enough, nothing lasts too long. No pleasure could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf, this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank. Many a time had she gone, at Barton when they were all talking, to look at the sky; seen it between peoples shoulders at dinner; seen it in London when she could not sleep. She walked to the window.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Sleep, Talking

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.193, Broadview Press

• If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people readingfor the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Reading, Mean

  Georg Brand, Virginia Woolf, Koizumi Yakumo, Hernández Felisberto (2017). “ON READING: Le plaisir de lire”, p.43, Pieffe Edizioni via PublishDrive

• Does housekeeping interest you at all? I think it really ought to be just as good as writing and I never see where the separation between the too comes in. At least if you must put books on one side and life on the other, each is a poor and bloodless thing; but my theory is that they mix indistinguishable.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Reading, Writing

• Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.

  Virginia Woolf

  Spiritual, Book, Writing

  Virginia Woolf (1991). “Paper Darts”

• We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Reading, People

• Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Domes, Helping

  Virginia Woolf (2005). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.611, Wordsworth Editions

• 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 glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.

  Virginia Woolf

  Children, Book, Reading

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.123, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep.

  Virginia Woolf

  Running, Book, Thinking

• I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.

  Virginia Woolf

  Witty, Jobs, Book

  Virginia Woolf (1975). “The letters of Virginia Woolf”, Harcourt

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