Home > Work > Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read

Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read QUOTES

Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read QUOTES

1 " But there is one peculiarity which real works of art possess in common. At each fresh reading one notices some change in them, as if the sap of life ran in their leaves, and with skies and plants they had the power to alter their shape and colour from season to season. To write down one’s impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year, would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments upon what we know. "

― Virginia Woolf , Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read

2 " We go back to her books and sometimes this quality strikes us and sometimes that. But all the while we are conscious of something that is greater than one gift or another and is perhaps the quality that attaches us to books as to people – the quality, that is, of the writer’s mind and personality. With their limitations and their great beauty these are stamped upon every page that Charlotte Brontë wrote. We do not need to know her story, or to have climbed the steep hill and gazed upon the stone house among the graves to feel her tremendous honesty and courage, and to know that she loved liberty and independence and the splendour of wild country, and men and women who are above all things passionate and true-minded. These are part of her as her imagination and genius are part of her; and they add to our admiration of her as a writer some peculiar warmth of feeling which makes us desire, when there is any question of doing her honour, to rise and salute her not only as a writer of genius, but as a very noble human being. "

― Virginia Woolf , Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read

3 " fresh reading … as if the sap of life ran in
their leaves, and with skies and plants they had the power to alter their shape
and color from season to season "

― Virginia Woolf , Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read