Virginia Woolf

I sat at my window in Richmond watching the river flow, thinking how we are all trapped by our own small lives. We cannot build a world because we are tied so tightly to the people beside us. To write truly, one must look beyond this narrow circle, yet many stop there, recording only their own private sorrows and joys as if they were the whole of human experience.

Yesterday I sat with a manuscript that refused to yield its music. I tried to force the rhythm, to make the sentences march in time with some grand design I had in my mind. I raised my voice until my throat was raw, demanding from the page what it would not give. The result was dry and flat, a mechanical thing without breath. When I finally stopped striving and let…

I see a mind so full of life that it cannot pause to admire its own work. When Defoe writes of Moll, he does not stop to tell me how cruel she is or how tragic her fall; the sorrow is there, heavy and real, simply because he has lived it. He moves forward as if the story pulls him along a river where the banks are too steep to…