Quote of the Day (Virginia Woolf, on How Books Are Made)

“A book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.” —English novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), A Room of One's Own (1929)

Few could construct sentences, let alone books, like Virginia Woolf, born 140 years ago today. She turned out, by this count, 34 books—essays, biographies, novels, and diary entries. As part of the Bloomsbury set of writers, artists and intellectuals, she also made it possible for others to find their creative voices.

Remarkably, she wrote all of this while being afflicted repeatedly with influenza and, ultimately and more damagingly, what are now believed to be episodes of bipolar disorder. The latter condition led her to commit suicide in 1941.

Woolf is one of the few authors whose work has become voluminous enough and life documented sufficiently to warrant not one, but several blogs devoted to her and/or the Bloomsbury circle, including Blogging Woolf.