Imogen Osborne

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Orson Welles
“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”
Orson Welles

Virginia Woolf
“Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than any words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.”
Virginia Woolf

Vita Sackville-West
“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this —But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.”
Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

Michael Ondaatje
“Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations.”
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Philip Larkin
“Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”
Philip Larkin, High Windows

year in books
Ismay
751 books | 67 friends

Harry B...
494 books | 74 friends

reba
618 books | 17 friends

Minnie
507 books | 56 friends

Sophie ...
482 books | 39 friends

Gabriel...
454 books | 109 friends

Harry C
642 books | 17 friends

mel
mel
1,711 books | 330 friends

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