Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.
Virginia WoolfSecond 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.
Virginia Woolfto teach without zest is a crime.
Virginia WoolfThey know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and then do what other people do when they have done it.
Virginia WoolfI really don't advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married
Virginia WoolfWhenever you see a board up with "Trespassers will be prosecuted," trespass at once.
Virginia WoolfTag: resistance
Would there be trees if we didn't see them?
Virginia WoolfAm I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?
Virginia WoolfIf it is true that there are books written to escape from the present moment, and its meanness and its sordidity, it is certainly true that readers are familiar with a corresponding mood. To draw the blinds and shut the door, to muffle the noises of the street and shade the glare and flicker of its lights—that is our desire. There is then a charm even in the look of the great volumes that have sunk, like the “Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia”, as if by their own weight down to the very bottom of the shelf. We like to feel that the present is not all; that other hands have been before us, smoothing the leather until the corners are rounded and blunt, turning the pages until they are yellow and dog’s-eared. We like to summon before us the ghosts of those old readers who have read their Arcadia from this very copy—Richard Porter, reading with the splendours of the Elizabethans in his eyes; Lucy Baxter, reading in the licentious days of the Restoration; Thos. Hake, still reading, though now the eighteenth century has dawned with a distinction that shows itself in the upright elegance of his signature. Each has read differently, with the insight and the blindness of his own generation. Our reading will be equally partial. In 1930 we shall miss a great deal that was obvious to 1655; we shall see some things that the eighteenth century ignored. But let us keep up the long succession of readers; let us in our turn bring the insight and the blindness of our own generation to bear upon the “Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia”, and so pass it on to our successors.
Virginia WoolfAll women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.
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