Orlando: A Biography

by Virginia Woolf

For, Heaven knows why, just as we have lost faith in human intercourse some random collocation of barns and trees or a haystack and a waggon presents us with so perfect a symbol of what is unattainable that we begin the search again.

Orlando saw them to be of a lustre such as is sometimes seen on teapots but rarely in a human face.

To feel her hanging lightly yet like a suppliant on her arm, roused in Orlando all the feelings which become a man. She looked, she felt, she talked like one. Yet, having been so lately a woman herself, she suspected that the girl’s timidity and her hesitating answers and the very fumbling with the key in the latch and the fold of her cloak and the droop of her wrist were all put on to gratify her masculinity.

So they would draw round the Punch bowl which

cannot be denied that when women get together—but hist—they are always careful to see that the doors are shut and that not a word of it gets into print.

All they desire, we were about to say when the gentleman took the very words out of our mouths.

Thus, stealthily, and imperceptibly, none marking the exact day or hour of the change, the constitution of England was altered and nobody knew it.

She turned back to the first page and read the date, 1586, written in her own boyish hand. She had been working at it for close on three hundred years now. It was time to make an end.

When the result of the lawsuit was made known (and rumour flew much quicker than the telegraph which has supplanted it), the whole town was filled with rejoicings.

Coins were well and duly laid under stones.

And so they would go on talking or rather, understanding, which has become the main art of speech in an age when words are growing daily so scanty in comparison with ideas that “the biscuits ran out” has to stand for kissing a negress in the dark when one has just read Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy for the tenth time.

and some sang aloud and others prayed and now a bird was dashed against the pane, and now there was a clap of thunder, so that no one heard the word Obey spoken or saw, except as a golden flash, the ring pass from hand to hand.

Must it then be admitted that Orlando was one of those monsters of iniquity who do not love? She was kind to dogs, faithful to friends, generosity itself to a dozen starving poets, had a passion for poetry. But love—as the male novelists define it—and who, after all, speak with greater authority?—has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is slipping off one’s petticoat and—But we all know what love is. Did Orlando do

For the first time in her life she turned with violence against nature.

At first Orlando supposed that she had arrived at some moment of national crisis; but whether it was happy or tragic, she could not tell.

Sometimes she passed down avenues of sedate mansions, soberly numbered ‘one,’ ‘two,’ ‘three,’ and so on right up to two or three hundred, each the copy of the other, with two pillars and six steps and a pair of curtains neatly drawn

the massive conglomeration of splendid objects moved, dispersed and disappeared into Piccadilly.

dreams which splinter the whole and tear us asunder and wound us and split us apart in the night when we would sleep; but sleep, sleep, so deep that all shapes are ground to dust of infinite softness, water of dimness inscrutable, and there, folded, shrouded, like a mummy, like a moth, prone let us lie on the sand at the bottom of sleep.

the road shone like silver-headed nails;

She took a list from her bag and began reading in a curious stiff voice at first as if she were holding the words—boy’s boots, bath salts, sardines—under a tap of many-coloured water.

Now as she stood with her hand on the door of her motor car, the present again struck her on the head. Eleven times she was violently assaulted.

meaning by that, Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another. Hence, the astonishing changes we see in our friends.

There was something strange in the shadow that the flicker of her eyes cast, something which (as anyone can test for himself by looking now at the sky), is always absent from the present—whence its terror, its nondescript character—something one trembles to pin through the body with a name and call beauty, for it has no body, is as a shadow and without substance or quality of its own, yet has the power to change whatever it adds itself to.

Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?