Today, March 28, is the 75th anniversary of
Virginia Woolf’s death. In her honour, I
am posting some of her quotations about books and reading:
“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems
without signing them, was often a woman.”
“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
“Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of
adventure fills us. Second-hand books
are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of
variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the
library lack. Besides, in this random
miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with
luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.”
“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.”
“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly
perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”
“I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the
divine specific.”
“Come indoors then, and open the books on your library
shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living
library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a
library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the
livers.”
“Anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as
the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.”
“Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common
ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for
ourselves.”
“Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted
reading.”
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