Home / Quotes / Quote by Virginia Woolf

Quote by Virginia Woolf

“…the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea…. It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus compelling words to a shape…. You have not finished with it because you have read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered. So we look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm, knowing that, come September or May, we shall sit down with them and talk.”

Author

Virginia Woolf

British modernist writer, known for her unique narrative techniques and profound portrayal of female experience. Her works include 'To the Lighthouse' and 'Mrs. Dalloway'. more

“...I am still librarian in your house, for I never was dismissed, and never gave up the office. Now I am librarian here as well.' 'But you have just told me you were sexton here!' 'So I am. It is much the same profession. Except you are a true sexton, books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!”

Books Libraries Librarians

Book:Lilith

Source: Lilith

“The more we have known of the really good things, the more insipid the thin lemonade of later literature becomes, sometimes almost to the point of making us sick. Do you know a work of literature written in the last, say, fifteen years that you think has any lasting quality? I don't. It is partly idle chatter, partly propaganda, partly self-pitying sentimentality, but there is no insight, no ideas, no clarity, no substance and almost always the language is bad and constrained. On this subject I am quite consciously a laudator temporis acti.”

Books

Book:Letters and Papers from Prison

Source: Letters and Papers from Prison

“Books are the best type of influence of the past...Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.”

Books

Book:The American Scholar: Self-Reliance, Compensation

Source: The American Scholar: Self-Reliance, Compensation