Virginia Woolf Quote Of The Day, Day Two

From A Room of One’s Own again (yes, it’s a cop out, but at least it’s not a cat picture):

What is meant by ‘reality’? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates. Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us…For the reading of these books seems to perform a curious couching operation on the senses; one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering and given an intenser life.

6 thoughts on “Virginia Woolf Quote Of The Day, Day Two

  1. Well, it’s pretty easy to tell when the Anonymous is one’s brother…although I appreciate the fact that other Anonymouses (Anonymi?) looks forward to the posts.

  2. Hmmm…another anonymous chiming in here. Just wanna separate myself from the previous comments. I DO NOT feel the posts of late have ‘blown’. I DO feel that this is better living’s forum to use in any way she sees fit, and I look forward to whatever she has to say every morning.

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