girl like a shadow

“Sometimes I want to scream but screaming is not in my nature, so I shut down and sleep for days and days and days until I wake up and feel completely silenced.”

– what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization –

Virginia Woolf sent Vita Sackville-West a dummy copy of the first edition of To The Lighthouse, on publication day, 5 May 1927. It was inscribed ‘In my opinion the best novel I have ever written.’ All the pages were blank. A few nights later she kept herself awake worrying that Vita might not have seen the joke, and sent an anxious note to ‘Dearest donkey West’: ‘Did you understand that when I wrote it was my best book I merely meant because all the pages were empty?’ Immediately Vita replied: ‘But of course I realised it was a joke; what do you take me for? A real donkey?’ She followed this with an effusive letter of praise for the ‘real’ To The Lighthouse: ‘Darling, it makes me afraid of you. Afraid of your penetration and loveliness and genius.’

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

The novel is, above all, an intense experience of prolonged intimacy with another consciousness.

We’re all kind of weird and twisted and drowning.

“The Idea of a life gets in the way of my life.”