Virginia Woolf Quotes About Literature

Quotes about: Literature

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

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Men, Others Opinions

  A Room of One's Own (1929) ch. 3

• To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.

  Virginia Woolf

  Reality, Literature, Disease

  Virginia Woolf (2006). “Orlando (Annotated): A Biography”, p.123, HMH

• A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Quality, Literature

  1925 The Common Reader, 'The Modern Essay'.

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

  Virginia Woolf

  Literature, Antagonist, Felt

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.306, Wordsworth Editions

• 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”

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

  Virginia Woolf

  Flames, Literature, World

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.859, Delphi Classics

• Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.

  Virginia Woolf

  Literature, Way, Common

  Virginia Woolf (1992). “A woman's essays: selected essays, volume one”

• Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.

  Virginia Woolf

  Nature, Tears, Together

  Virginia Woolf, Michael H. Whitworth (2014). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.13, Oxford University Press, USA

• The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.

  Virginia Woolf

  Mistake, Reading, Writing

• There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.... the essay must be pure--pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.

  Virginia Woolf

  Wine, Water, Literature

  Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.14, Oxford University Press

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

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, People, Imperfection

  1925 The Common Reader, 'George Eliot'.

• Mr. Beerbohm in his way is perfect ... He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes ... He is without doubt the prince of his profession.

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Men, Perfect

• That complete statement which is literature.

  Virginia Woolf

  Literature, Statements

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.2406, Delphi Classics

• The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass

  Virginia Woolf

  Real, Home, Leaves Of Grass

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3129, Delphi Classics

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

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Literature, Ifs

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4409, Delphi Classics

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

  Virginia Woolf

  Self, Six, Literature

  Orlando ch. 6 (1928)

• literature is the record of our discontent.

  Virginia Woolf

  Records, Literature, Discontent

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.2014, Delphi Classics

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

  Virginia Woolf

  Literature, Rooms, Essays

  Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.12, Oxford University Press

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