“If poets have vision to prophesy truth, I shall live in my fame”

“Dialogue with the people is neither a concession nor a gift, much less a tactic to be used for domination. Dialogue, as the encounter among men to “name” the world, is a fundamental precondition for their humanisation”

“To speak a true word is to transform the world”

“May we trust that this blessed ship is bound for some better shore, some undrowned Lemuria, risen and redeemed, where the American fate, mercifully, failed to transpire…”

“Kirilov must kill himself out of love for humanity. He must show his brothers a royal and difficult path in which he will be the first. It is a pedagogical suicide. Kirilov sacrifices himself, then. But if he is crucified, he will not be victimised.”

I feel this simultaneous repudiation, acceptance and acquittal of the artificial ideologies that bind is such a central part of transformative literature. K. willingly marches to his end, Hamlet sews his unravelling, Quentin fractures his proximity to time, all conscious suicides made to obviate the metaphysical/textual conditions to colour their suffering. Is there martyrdom in this? Or is that another depreciating illusion. I think Ippolit’s fate is enlightening on this, in the performance of suicide as an act of freedom toward the extrinsic world, we lose that which fuels our interiority; ego death, or the loss of respect in our individuality, is commensurably fatal

“You don’t have to consider everything true, you just have to consider it necessary”

“I will exile my thoughts if they think of you again, and I will rip my lips out if they say your name once more. Now if you do exist, I will tell you my final word in life or in death, I tell you goodbye.”

“The worst part is wondering how you'll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you'll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always flounder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows.”

“If you could seperate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I,’ and cuts you off forever from the ‘we.’”

Interiority I haven’t seen expressed with such concision and sagacity. A truly empathetic work, one of most moving I’ve read.

Works well in conjunction with (and I presume a facilitating inspiration for) Varda’s Cleo from 5 till 7

On the surface an interesting, albeit facile examination of gender roles. Despite the warmth and opulence of the prose, I found myself missing the incisiveness of the other Woolf that I’ve read, which not insignificantly contributed to my sheer boredom for a majority of the book. It doesn’t help that Woolf can at times typify that arrogant, English proclivity of classism and mythologising; it detracts from the beauty of the work and masques what else is offered in a veil of tart pretension.

Yet, it’s undeniable there is a deeply personal and imaginative narrative being told here of love, artistry, legacy, and the anxiety of the passage of time. My scruples aside, this is an effusive portrait of Woolf’s mind, reveries and neuroses included.