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.

There are books which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

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.

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

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.

I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

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.

Why not blame the libraries? They’re full of violent books.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

As a child I used to read Gone with the Wind over and over again. I wanted to be Scarlett O’Hara. I never wanted to believe that it was possible that there could be infidelity. I never wanted to be believe that it was even possible for a man to look another way, even for a moment. My bubble of monogamy was pierced in a harsh way.

Classic – A book which people praise and don’t read.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

An autobiography is not about pictures; it’s about the stories; it’s about honesty and as much truth as you can tell without coming too close to other people’s privacy.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.