"…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...
Books are the mirrors of the soul.
More Virginia Woolf quotes
"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, ...
"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
"They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.
"For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.
"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...
"Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters, defilers, the wr...
"I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.