Our inherited biases about who should write what live deeper than most of us realize or want to acknowledge.
Virginia Woolf
Posted inBooks, Quotes
The Pain of Loss, Through Centuries and Books
“My father is dead, I said to myself, my father is dead. Again and again I said it, and still I failed to grasp what it meant.”
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Mortal Enemy, Immortal Ally: How Writers Measure Time
Time carried back to the future, once again seen and understood as it was in antiquity, not only as mortal enemy but also as immortal ally. The counterrevolution against the autocratic regime of uniform, global time (commercially and politically imperialist) was pressed forward by many of the artists and writers of Einstein’s generation unwilling to […]
Posted inFiction, Quotes
Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando’: ‘The Longest and Most Charming Love Letter in Literature’
Orlando has long had a towering, and very much deserved, reputation in the LGBT community; it was published the same year Radclyffe Hall’s controversial The Well of Loneliness, depicting lesbianism as a tragic curse, became a bestseller. Woolf’s creation of a figure who effortlessly changes sex casually upends any notion that biological sex is related […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Solitude, and the Contrast Between the Outside World and Our Inner Selves
There can be something enjoyable, even revelatory about that feeling of self-protection, which is why we seek out circumstances in which we can feel more acutely the contrast between the outside world and our inner selves. Woolf was fascinated by city life—by the feeling of solitude-on-display that the sidewalk encourages, and by the way that […]
Posted inBooks, Quotes
The Future Is Dark: Uncertainty's Creative Power
Rebecca Solnit, writing in The New Yorker, offers a celebration of the imagination’s best ally: the ability to say “I don’t know.” Solnit looks at subtlety and subjectivity in her own writing, and in that of a hero of the art, Virginia Woolf: During my years as an art critic I used to joke that museums love artists the way that taxidermists love deer, and something […]