Summary: Virginia Woolf emphasizes that reading should be a personal and immersive experience, encouraging readers to fully engage with the author rather than impose their own judgments. She believes that true understanding comes from both receiving impressions and reflecting on them, which enriches our creative powers. Ultimately, Woolf highlights the joy of reading as its own reward, valuing the reader's role in shaping literature.
Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. (View Highlight)
Nothing is easier and more stultifying than to make rules which exist out of touch with facts, in a vacuum. (View Highlight)
