“For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.”

— Virginia Woolf, book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

Last update Sept. 27, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge…" by Virginia Woolf?

Virginia Woolf382

English writer 1882–1941

Related quotes

“To call that writing, madam, is an insult to quills and ink across the world.”

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Source: To Catch an Heiress

“You know, it's hard work to write a book. I can't tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing tunic.”

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

Source: The Funny Thing Is...

“Nathaniel Hawthorne says, “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” I try to pull the language into such a sharpness that it jumps off the page. It must look easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Paris Review Interview (1990)

“But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling, like dew, upon a thought produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions think.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

“A Man may dwell so long upon a Thought, that it may take him Prisoner.”

George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax (1633–1695) English politician

Political, Moral, and Miscellaneous Reflections (1750), Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflections

“Disease is contagious, and death an unavoidable necessity. Pleasure is often exhausting, and life is everywhere interpolated with pain. Droughts, darknesses, floods, pestilences, storms, and scourges harrow the earth from one pole of it to the other. The earth is, and always has been, peopled by deformities—creatures so defective in their natures that they visit upon each other without hesitancy crimes and barbarities of the most horrible hue. These wretches are compelled to pass their lives in the midst of a universe so mysterious and mighty that the most arrogant of us are helpless in the crash and melee of its tendencies. Yet human contemplators look out over this dark and contentious chaos and declare it to be without spot or blemish.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Problem, pp. 87–88

“There is nothing more splendid than the prospect of sitting in the morning before a new ink-stone and a sheet of white paper. The smell of the white paper is like the scent of the skin of a new lover who has just paid a surprise visit out of a rainy garden. And the black ink is like lacquered hair. And the quill? Well the quill is like the instrument of pleasure whose purpose is never in doubt but whose surprising efficiency one always -- always forgets.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

, quoted in Peter Greenaway's The
The Pillow Book

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

Also attributed to Ernest Hemingway and others; the earliest definite occurrence of this yet found in research for Wikiquote is by Maya Angelou, who stated it in Conversations With Maya Angelou (1989) edited by Jeffrey M. Elliot:
I think it's Alexander Pope who says, "Easy writing is damn hard reading," and vice versa, easy reading is damn hard writing
The statement she referred to is most probably:
You write with ease, to show your breeding,
But easy writing's curst hard reading
Clio's Protest, or the Picture Varnished (written 1771, published 1819) by Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Disputed

“Easy writing makes hard reading.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

As quoted in Paris Was Our Mistress (1947) by Samuel Putnam, p. 128

“An individual who isn't worth the ink it would take to write about him.”

Sharon Stone (1958) American actress and fashion model

About Steven Seagal <br class="br"> Sharon Stone tells all and then some http://web.archive.org/web/20030220075717/http://www.salon.com/people/col/reit/1999/08/13/stone/

“For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Virginia Woolf382

Related quotes

Related topics