enjoying this...

". . . my eyes are entirely grey with England . . . and you can't imagine how much of a physical desire it becomes to feed them on colour and crags-- something violent and broken and dry-- not perpetually sloping and sloppy like the country here."

- Virginia Woolf in a letter to Gerald Brenan, Christmas Day, 1922


"I think I mean that beauty, which you say I sometimes achieve, is only got by the failure to get it;
by grinding all the flints together; by facing what must be humiliation-- the things one can't do--
To aim at beauty deliberately, without this apparently insensate struggle, would result, I think, in
little daisies and forget-me-nots--simpering sweetnesses-- true love knots-- But I agree that we
must (we, in our generation must) renounce finally the achievement of the greater beauty: the
beauty which comes from completeness . . . . One must renounce, when the book is finished; but
not before it is begun."

- Virginia Woolf in a letter to Gerald Brenan, Christmas Day, 1922