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Saturday 16 May 2015

Saturday Rave: The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf.

I quoted Virginia Woolf last week, and it was while I was researching that post that I came across this line:

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in an eternity of print.

That's from The Common Reader, a collections of essays published in 1925.

I can't say I really warm to Virginia Woolf, either as a writer or a person (though I very much enjoyed Orlando). 

And I'm fairly sure she was far too much of a social and intellectual snob ever to have warmed to me.

Oh, but that line! We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in an eternity of print.

It describes how I feel about a lot of her novels just absolutely perfectly.

Word To Use Today: common. This word comes from the Old French commun, from the Latin commūnis, which means general or universal.


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