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Quote by Virginia Woolf

“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. - The Death of the Moth”

Quote by Virginia Woolf

Work

The Secret, Book & Scone Society

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Author

Virginia Woolf
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

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“The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him, life; it went out from him, truth. It came to him, business; it went from him, poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of the mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.”

“Even big collections of ordinary [non-magical] books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one of those that look as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more staircases than stories and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.”

“You have to read a book for some reason, and you're not that excited about it, but you're a good person, you're not going to say you read a book when you didn't. So you run your eyes over every single line. And yet, when you get to the end, much more quickly than you should've, you'd be hard-pressed to explain even the basics of the book. It has a main character, and that main character had a problem. Maybe? Things happened, and then the problem resolved. Probably...we didn't really read the book. We saw very page of the book.”