I think Virginia Woolf and I would have got along famously. As I read A Room With a View, I found that her writing style--her voice--resonated with me more than anyone I have read before. And so I found some more from her.
About love:
“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?”
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
About life:
“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
About Jane Austen and used books:
“Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.”
“Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.”
“Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read.”
About being a woman:
“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”
“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
About being a BYU coed:
“I really don't advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married”
You know that age-old question, the one about who--dead or alive-- you would like to have dinner with? I think I'd choose her--at least this week I would. I imagine that after our homemade meal we would sit on her wrap-around porch sipping peach tea.
She'd pose the question:
“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?”
And I wonder how I'd reply.
