The Common Reader

by Virginia Woolf
England
25 Jan 1882 // 28 Mar 1941
Writer

Quotes



We scarcely want to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.

The Common Reader
A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

The Common Reader
There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.

The Common Reader
For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.

The Common Reader
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

The Common Reader
Communication is truth; communication is happiness. To share is our duty; to go down boldly and bring to light those hidden thoughts which are the most diseased; to conceal nothing; to pretend nothing; if we are ignorant to say so; if we love our friends to let them know it.

The Common Reader
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The Common Reader

Virginia Woolf

 

On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays