"What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself...into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life."
--Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary
3 comments:
Well, that would be Virginia Woolf's journal I guess. Whenever I come back to mine, it has morphed into a group of writings that sound awful. A voice I hate. UhOh. Maybe that says something about my self esteem.
Reading my diary from years ago tells me that I tend to be a mix of boring and dramatic. Not Virgina "Woolfish" at all.
Oh, see, but that's what I like here: she says it SHOULD be a big old boring mess, if it needs to be. I think she hated her journal voice too, Ammie. That's the trouble with being the foremost female Modernist: people publish your messy journals.
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