Virginia Woolf

Very jaded and tired and depressed and cross…Must fill my mind with air and light, and walk and blanket it in fog.

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.

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution – such call I good books.

The last book I read was the book I’ve been rereading most of my life, The Fountainhead.

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.

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

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

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

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.

Just the omission of Jane Austen’s books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it. – Vronksy (Anna Karenina)