Virginia Woolf

It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?… What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.

Very jaded and tired and depressed and cross…Must fill my mind with air and light, and walk and blanket it in fog.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

Just the omission of Jane Austen’s books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookshelf on the wall.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him to the public.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it. – Vronksy (Anna Karenina)

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.

The last book I read was the book I’ve been rereading most of my life, The Fountainhead.