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Virginia Woolf Quotes about Reading

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Books are the mirrors of the soul.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

Book, Reading, Mirrors

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

The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

Reading, Giving, Advice

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.2597, Delphi Classics

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

Freedom, Women, Reading

Virginia Woolf (2005). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.610, Wordsworth Editions

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.

Book, Reading, Sound

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

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 bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.

Reading, People, Giving

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

Book, Reading, Thought Provoking

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

To communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province.

Reading, Delight, Chiefs

Virginia Woolf (2013). “The Common Reader”, p.63, Lulu Press, Inc

Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.

Reading, Thinking, Heaven

Virginia Woolf (1975). “The Letters of Virginia Woolf: 1932-1935”

I have sometimes dreamt ... that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards -- their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble -- the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.

Book, Reading, Names

Virginia Woolf (1972). “Collected essays”

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.

Book, Reading, People

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.

Book, Reading, Mean

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

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 and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.

Fall, Reading, Writing

Virginia Woolf, Michael H. Whitworth (2014). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.46, Oxford University Press, USA

Reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once - hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head - all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response).

Reading, Air, Doors

Virginia Woolf (2017). “The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5: 1929 - 1932”, p.298, Random House

...so now, Mrs. Ramsay thought, she could return to that dream land, that unreal but fascinating place, the Manning's drawing-room at Marlow twenty years ago; where one moved about without haste or anxiety, for there was no future to worry about. She knew what had happened to them, what to her. It was like reading a good book again, for she knew the end of that story, since it had happened twenty years ago, and life, which shot down even from this dining-room table in cascades, heaven knows where, was sealed up there, and lay, like a lake, placidly between its banks.

Dream, Reading, Book

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.315, Wordsworth Editions

I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.

Block, Reading, Amber

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.

Art, Reading, Difficult

Virginia Woolf (2013). “The Common Reader”, p.375, Lulu Press, Inc

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Book, Reading, Form

The Captain's Death Bed, 'Reading' (published 1950).

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.

Mistake, Reading, Writing

A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.

Reading, Book, Passion

Virginia Woolf, Andrew McNeillie (1986). “The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1912-1918”, Harcourt

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.

Book, Reading, Writing

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.

Children, Book, Reading

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

He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above his paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged with existence.

Reading, Sleep, Hands

Virginia Woolf (2016). “To the Lighthouse”, p.166, Tyché

Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.

Book, Reading, Reading Books

Virginia Woolf, Morag Shiach (1998). “A Room of One's Own: And, Three Guineas”, p.142

It was love, she thought, love that never clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of human gain. The world by all means should have shared it, could Mr Bankes have said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem.

Reading, Mean, Boys

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Ao farol: To the lighthouse: Edição bilíngue português - inglês”, p.208, Editora Landmark LTDA

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