April 2011
31 posts
March 2011
41 posts
“We are - oh! - in more ways than one, like the Athenians of the Periclean age. We are the mysterious priests of a new and amazing civilization. We have abolished religion, we have founded ethics, we have established philosophy, we have sown a strange illumination in every province of thought, we have conquered art, we have liberated love…Your letter was wonderful, and I was particularly impressed by the curious masculinity of it. Why are you a man? We are females, nous autres, but your mind is singularly male.”
— Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf, in a 1904 letter written shortly after they had left Cambridge.
“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless, nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple, desperate, human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed, and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is really just a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this—but oh my dear, I can’t be clever and standoffish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how standoffish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defenses. And I don’t really resent it.
» Vita Sackville-West (1926)” —Do Right Woman: Love Letter
» Vita Sackville-West (1926)” —Do Right Woman: Love Letter
“The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.”
—E.M. Forster, Howards End
