#r

Leonard Woolf’s endurance of Virginia’s famous frigidity is, we must suppose after the fact, altogether to his credit. Their honeymoon did not bring the amelioration they had hoped for and it is incredibly innocent and moving to think of them discussing it with Vanessa. They wanted to know when she had first had an orgasm. She said she couldn’t remember but she knew she had been “sympathetic” from the age of two. Vita Sackville-West said about Virginia, “She dislikes the possessiveness and love of domination in men. In fact she dislikes the quality of masculinity. ↗

— Elizabeth Hardwick

#vanessa-bell #virginia-woolf #vita-sacksville-west #age

The war against Napoleon was won not by England but by Russia, Austria, and Prussia; but England won the last battle and she won the peace. ↗

— J. Christopher Herold

#napoleonic-wars #age

Angry men have little to live for when their rage becomes ineffective. ↗

— Miguel Syjuco

#anger

If I could just get a piece of lemon, it'd be great. ↗

— Rip Torn

#get #great #i #if i could #just

We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants; thanks to them, we see farther than they. Busying ourselves with the treatises written by the ancients, we take their choice thoughts, buried by age and human neglect, and we raise them, as it were from death to renewed life." -Peter of Blois (d. 1212). ↗

— Carter Lindberg

#history-of-thought #intellectual-history #age

Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the "new people" whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to ↗

— Edith Wharton

#learning #age

I look at the others, simpering courtiers and visiting dignitaries, all unsuspecting of what is to come. A merciful man should spare them, but I had mercy cut out of me at a young age. ↗

— A.F. Stewart

#curse #magic #ruined-city #wizard #age

Reading books in one's youth is like looking at the moon through a crevice; reading books in middle age is like looking at the moon in one's courtyard; and reading books in old age is like looking at the moon on an open terrace. ↗

— Lin Yutang

#perception #age

The age of recording is necessarily an age of nostalgia--when was the past so hauntingly accessible?--but its bitterest insight is the incapacity of even the most perfectly captured sound to restore the moment of its first inscribing. That world is no longer there. ↗

— Geoffrey O'Brien

#nostalgia #recording-music #age

Oh, you knew that your deed would be preserved in books, would reach tghe depths of the ages and the utmost limits of the earth, and you hoped that, following you, man, too, would remain with God, having no need of miracles. But you did not know that as soon as man rejects miracles, he will at once reject God as well, for man seeks not so much God as miracles. And since man cannot bear to be left without miracles, he will go and create new miracles for himself... Oh, there will be centuries of free reason, of their science and anthropophagy... Freedom, free reason, and science willl lead them into such a maze, and confront them with such miracles and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, unruly and ferocious, will exterminate themselves. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#free-will #freedom #philosophy #sublime #age