“He knew the world in a deep and extraordinary manner. He was himself a deep and extraordinary world.”
An Obituary for Franz Kafka by Milena Jesenská; tr. George Gibian
Woolf on illness: “it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature”
imagine you’re struggling to merge off the 110 to take the 6th street exit while high above, Joyce Carol Oates observes you with the cold, Olympian gaze of a god
#OTD Friday May 15 1925
“Two unfavourable reviews of Mrs D. (Western Mail and Scotsman): unintelligible, not art etc. and a letter from a young man in Earls Court. ‘This time you have done it – you have caught life and put it in a book…’”
Virginia Woolf A Writer’s Diary, 1953