by Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941)
The Diary (April, 1919)
Language: English
What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something . . . so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk . . . in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life.
Note: this is a prose text; the line breaks are arbitrary.
Text Authorship:
- by Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941) [author's text not yet checked against a primary source]
Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):
- by Dominick Argento (1927 - 2019), "The Diary (April, 1919)", from From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, no. 1. [ sung text checked 1 time]
Research team for this page: Emily Ezust [Administrator] , Malcolm Wren [Guest Editor]
This text was added to the website: 2008-07-01
Line count: 8
Word count: 99