Roman Clodia’s Reviews > Selected Letters > Status Update

'But I feel I have gone too far this time to come back again. I am certain now that I am going mad again. It is just like the first time, I am always hearing voices, and I know I shant get over it now ... I have fought against it, but I cant any longer.'
(23? March 1941, to Vanessa)

'... you dont know what a queer place London is - Here we are running in and out of each other's houses with torches and gas masks. Black night descends. Rain pours.'
(16 October 1939)

'... we are all under the shadow of Hitler at the moment... As for Leonard he works all day, drafting measures for the Labour Party'
(11 March 1936)

'That's because you're in love with another, damn you!... I said to myself, no wonder Vita no longer loves you, because you bore her and if there's one thing love won't stand it's boredom.'

'Of course, and of course, I'm not such a pacifist as to deny that practical evils must be put to the sword: I admit fighting to the death for votes, wages, peace and so on: what I can't abide is the man who wishes to convert other men's minds'
(18 May 1931)

'... but I was always sexually cowardly... My terror of real life has always kept me in a nunnery.'
(22 June 1930)

'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.'
(8 September 1928)

'I should make a vile mother... I slightly distrust or suspect the maternal passion. It is obviously immeasurable and unscrupulous. You would fry us all to cinders to give Angelica a days pleasure, without knowing it.'
(21 April 1927 to Vanessa)

'the spirit that inspires [religion], with its unction and hypocrisy, and God is love, which still leaves room for flea bites, pin pricks, and advertising astuteness, would enrage, were it not that there's something so mild and wobbly about that too that I can't waste good wrath '

'But I find that talk about the Ballet has its limitations. Not indeed that she [Lydia Lopokova] dances anymore: unfortunately she sometimes writes.'
(24 June 2023)