or found his mirror there;

People have been scared away from the “classics” by inadequate teachers, or led to believe that writers learn only from their contemporaries. A writer who wants to write good stuff needs to read great stuff. If you don’t read widely, or read only writers in fashion at the moment, you’ll have a limited idea of what can be done with the English language.

A candle loses nothing by lighting another.

I have come to regard November as the older, harder man’s October. I appreciate the early darkness and cooler temperatures. It puts my mind in a different place than October. It is a month for a quieter, slightly more subdued celebration of summer’s death as winter tightens its grip.

Look for yourself, and ask not what has been real and what has been false, but what has been bitter, and what has been sweet.

“Novembers are for softest sleep when skies are dark and grey. They do not mind the time you keep when night looks much like day. They do not mind the rain that falls so warmly down your cheek. ‘Rest easy now’ is what they’d say if months knew how to speak.”

All the stars of your midnight and mine are riddled with wounds;

I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough, To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough, To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough.

I like to feel the spine of your body and its bones, and the trembling -firm-smooth ness and which I will again and again and again kiss

Anyway it will be autumn tomorrow or the next day: I can smell it in the air–summer smoldering.

…the descent to the Underworld is easy. / night and day the gates of shadowy Death stand open wide, / but to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air— / there the struggle, there the labor lies….

What shall I say to my urgent heart? Shall I refuse to go? If it is my calling heart, Shall I answer “No”?

I will end… with a little scene that took place in the last months of peace. They were the most terrible months of my life, for, helplessly and hopelessly, one watched the inevitable approach of war. One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler—the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers… Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.” I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.” Last March, twenty-one years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowered under the apple-tree in the orchard.

« Readers who don’t like books that are not printed television, fast on thrills and feeling, soft on the brain, are not criticizing literature, they are missing it altogether. A work of fiction, a poem, that is literature, that is art, can only be itself, can never be anything else. Nor can anything else substitute for it. The serious writer cannot be in competition for sales and attention with the bewildering range of products from the ever expanding leisure industry. She can only offer what she has ever offered: an exceptional sensibility combined with an exceptional control over words.