Quote of the Day (Virginia Woolf, on a London Winter in Early Evening)

“The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.” —English novelist-essayist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” in The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays (1942)