Virginia Woolf - Read Quotes

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Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read.

Virginia Woolf

We read Charlotte Bronte not for exquisite observation of character, not for comedy, not for a philosophic view of life, but for her poetry. Probably that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering personality, so that... they only have to open the door to make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things.

Virginia Woolf

How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers.

Virginia Woolf

For it has to be remembered that crime and poverty had none of the attractions for the Elizabethans that they have for us. They had none of our modern shame of book leaning, none of our belief that to be born the son of a butcher is a blessing an to be unable to read a virtue; no fancy that what we call 'life' and 'reality' are somehow connected with ignorance and brutality nor, indeed any equivalent for these two words at all. It was not to seek 'life' that Orlando went among them not in quest of 'reality' that he left them.

Virginia Woolf

It's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.

Virginia Woolf

I got out this diary and read, as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity.

Virginia Woolf

But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the teashop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him- he could not feel. He could reason; he could read, Dante for example, quite easily…he could add up his bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then- that he could not feel.

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.

Virginia Woolf

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination.

Virginia Woolf

All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the general mind which they interpret and indeed almost discover, so that we come to read them rather for that than for any story or character or scene of seperate excellence.

Virginia Woolf

But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.

Virginia Woolf

Writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.

Virginia Woolf

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

Virginia Woolf

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

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 what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions — there we have none.

Virginia Woolf

She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell and she had felt that was true of life — one scratched on the wall.

Virginia Woolf

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

Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties—one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. Who was I then? Adeline Virginia Stephen, the second daughter of Leslie and Julia Prinsep Stephen, born on 25th January 1882, descended from a great many people, some famous, others obscure; born into a large connection, born not of rich parents, but of well-to-do parents, born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world.

Virginia Woolf

Writing is a divine art, and the more I write and read the more I love it.

Virginia Woolf

Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.

Virginia Woolf

Never did I read such tosh. As for the first two chapters we will let them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th – merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges.

Virginia Woolf

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