F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a letter to his editor written in July, 1922. He was referring to The Great Gatsby.
’..This was life, that two people, no matter how carefully chosen, could not be everything to each other.’
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| — | Doris Lessing, To Room Nineteen |
INTERVIEWER
Does the manuscript of the original, uncut Waste Land exist?
ELIOT
Don’t ask me. That’s one of the things I don’t know. It’s an unsolved mystery. I sold it to John Quinn. I also gave him a notebook of unpublished poems, because he had been kind to me in various affairs. That’s the…
The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s online exhibition, “Intimate Circles: American Women in the Arts”, is wonderful, so I’ve arranged some of the Usual Suspects into this motivational photoset— you should all now be motivated to follow the link immediately.
“And that’s the end,” she said, and she saw in his eyes, as the interest of the story died away in them, something else take its place; something wondering, pale, like the reflection of a light, which at once made him gaze and marvel. Turning, she looked across the bay, and there, sure enough, coming regularly across the waves first two quick strokes and then one long steady stroke, was the light of the Lighthouse. It had been lit.
In a moment he would ask her, “Are we going to the Lighthouse?” And she would have to say, “No: not tomorrow; your father says not.” Happily, Mildred came in to fetch them, and the bustle distracted them. But he kept looking back over his shoulder as Mildred carried him out, and she was certain that he was thinking, we are not going to the Lighthouse tomorrow; and she thought, he will remember that all his life.
—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
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Painting: The Little Granddaughter
by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida
Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?
—Djuna Barnes, aged 68, in a letter to Natalie Barney.
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Photo: still from an original footage, reproduced in a documentary Paris Was a Woman (1996) by Andrea Weiss and G. Schiller
Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.
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| — | D. H. Lawrence (via bettymaestrange) |
Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don’t, will is pitted against will. ‘Admire me, for I am a metaphor.’
—David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish)
