Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame
Virginia WoolfIf one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I donโt admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers donโt do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.
Virginia WoolfA writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.
Virginia WoolfThe English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass
Virginia Woolf