"Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all..." - Quote by Virginia Woolf

“I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry. When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch unregarded I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes down with all its feet on the floor. None of those resonances and lovely echoes that break and chime from nerve to nerve in our breasts making wild music, false phrases. I have done with phrases.”

“She tapped on the window with her embossed hairbrush. They were too far off to hear. The drone of the trees was in their ears; the chirp of birds; other incidents of garden life, inaudible, invisible to her in the bedroom, absorbed them. Isolated on a green island, hedged about with snowdrops, laid with a counterpane of puckered silk, the innocent island floated under her window. Only George lagged behind.”

“Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.”

“If books are not good company, where shall I find it?”

“Books, books, books! I had found the secret of a garret room Piled high with cases in my father’s name; Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past, Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there At this or that box, pulling through the gap, In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first. And how I felt it beat Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark, An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!”

“The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.”

“Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.”

“What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?”

“Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching.”