reem > Recent Status Updates

I feel like I owe it to Roger Fry to read about his life. He was quite the character and Virginia could write anything and everything it seems.

I’m not even half way through but THIS IS WAY TOO GOOD. 10/10. I love the details, the intricate language, the beautiful sentences that digress, ugh I wish I could write like that.

I have no idea who Roger Fry even was... but this just goes to prove that I will read anything written by a brilliant writer.

Has anyone read two translations at the same time? Is it disorienting?

"I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of the gulf, which words can't cross; that it's to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish." - Virginia

"But a novel, as I say, to be good should seem, before one writes it, something unwriteable: but only visible; so that for nine months one lives in despair, and only when one has forgotten what one meant, does the book seem tolerable. I assure you, all my novels were first rate before they were written." - Virginia

"The Seafarers Educational Society has bought 2 copies of The Lighthouse. It's an awful thought that the merchant service will be taught navigation by me: or the proper use of foghorns and cylinders." Hahaha!

"Have you read him? say your lips without sound, says your breath and your blood that circulates like the beam of a lighthouse."

"On the dog's path, my soul came upon my heart. Shattered, but alive, dirty, poorly dressed, and filled with love."

"A Chilean educated in Mexico can withstand everything."

"Only fever and poetry provoke visions."

"An intelligent woman. A beautiful woman. Knew all the variants, all the possibilities. Reader of Duchamp's aphorisms and the stories of Defoe."

"Sunsets of infinite white and infinite black."

"An unshockable woman, she had once listened to Mr Robert's description of his haemorrhoids for over an hour on a New Year's Eve and had allowed him, without protest, to call them the grapes of wrath" LOL

"He was penniless, and hoped, in a vague way, to live on women."

"I was a lonely night walker and a steady stand-at-corners. I liked to walk through the wet town after midnight, when the streets were deserted and the window lights out, alone and alive on the glistening tramlines in dead and empty High Street under the moon, gigantically sad in the damp streets by ghostly Ebenezer Chapel."

"Her real claim to consideration is... her legs. Oh they are exquisite – running like slender pillars up into her trunk, which is that of a breastless cuirassier but all about her is virginal, savage, patrician; and why she writes, which she does with complete competency and a pen of brass, is a puzzle to me. If I were she, I would merely stride, with 11 Elk hounds behind me, through my ancestral woods.’"

This one hurts the heart too, too much.

“Oh, but we’re all agreed by this time that nature’s a mistake. She’s either very ugly, appallingly uncomfortable, or absolutely terrifying. I don’t know which alarms me most—a cow or a tree. I once met a cow in a field by night. The creature looked at me. I assure you it turned my hair grey. It’s a disgrace that the animals should be allowed to go at large.”

“I often wonder,” Clarissa mused in bed, over the little white volume of Pascal which went with her everywhere, “whether it is really good for a woman to live with a man who is morally her superior, as Richard is mine. It makes one so dependent. I suppose I feel for him what my mother and women of her generation felt for Christ. It just shows that one can’t do without something.”

"The people who really care about an art are always the least affected."

"Nobody questioned, nobody wondered any more—because nobody had time to remember. The old risk of prying curiosity, of malicious gossip, was virtually over: one was left with one’s drama, one’s disaster, on one’s hands, because there was nobody to stop and notice the little shrouded object one was carrying."

Let me tell you, nobody writes like this anymore. "She had a natural contempt for people who gloried in what they need only have endured."

"It is never pleasant when a stupid person, of whom we have previously been fond perhaps because of his very stupidity, suddenly acquires some wisdom, no, it is never pleasant."

I'm losing my mind, they're all insane.

I feel kind of alienated that I'm enjoying 'The Landlady' more than 'Poor Folk.'