Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.
Virginia WoolfWhen I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.
Virginia WoolfBut when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter!
Virginia Woolf