wispfox

Just really liking the turns of phrases, so I share yet more from the book I just finished.

'"Are you positive you aren't a man?" he would ask anxiously, and she would echo.
"Can it be possible you're not a woman?" and then they must put it to the proof without more ado. For each was so surprised at the quickness of the other's sympathy, and it was to each such a revelation that a woman could be as tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as srange and subtle as a woman, that they had to put the matter to the proof at once.'

"She was married, true; but if one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts."

"For she was extremely doubtful whether, if the spirit had examined the contents of her mind carefully, it would not have found something highly contraband for which she would have had to pay the full fine. She had only escaped by the skin of her teeth. She had just managed, by some dexterous deference to the spirit of the age, by putting on a ring and finding a man on a moor, by loving nature and being no satirist, cynic, or psychologist - any one of which goods would have been discovered at once - to pass its examination successfully. And she heaved a deep sigh of relief, as, indeed, well she might, for the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicasy, and upon a nice arragement between the two the whole fortune of his works depends. Orlando had so ordered it that she was in an extremely happy position; she was it, yet remained herself. Now, therefore, she could write, and write she did. She wrote. She wrote. She wrote."

"For she had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand."

"The whole of herself darkened and settled, as when some foil whose addition makes the round and solidity of a surface is added to it, and the shallow becomes deep and the near distant; and all is contained as water is contained by the sides of a well. So she was now darkened, stilled, and become, with the addition of this Orlando, what is called, rightly or wrongly, a single self, a real self. And she fell silent. For it is probable that when people talk aloud the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disseverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said."