Book

The Common Reader

Woolf’s first and most popular volume of essays. This collection has more than twenty-five selections, including such important statements as “Modern Fiction” and “The Modern Essay.” Edited and with an Introduction by Andrew McNeillie; Index. </di

(7 total)

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Virginia Woolf (7)

“Theirs, too, is the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“We may enjoy our room in the tower, with the painted walls and the commodious bookcases, but down in the garden there is a man digging who buried his father this morning, and it is he and his like who live the real life and speak the real language.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“But delightful though it is to indulge in righteous indignation, it is misplaced if we agree with the lady's-maid that high birth is a form of congenital insanity, that the sufferer merely inherits the diseases of his ancestors, and endures them, for the most part very stoically, in one of those com…”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“But can we go to posterity with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those days, with the whole of literature before them, to sift our enormous rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls? Such are the questions which the critics might lawfully put to their companions at table, the novelists and poet…”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“For ourselves, who are ordinary men and women, let us return thanks to Nature for her bounty by using every one of the senses she has given us; vary our state as much as possible; turn now this side, now that, to the warmth, and relish to the full before the sun goes down the kisses of youth and the…”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com