A Writer's Diary (1918 - 1941) - Complete edition

Here is what happens in 1930 to the first sentence of 1926: very little, almost nothing. There are some small changes to punctuation, as when “arm chair” acquires a hyphen. In a sentence that is governed in its opening lines by the (somewhat confusing) play of light and dark, Woolf avoids a minor repetition when she writes “what wastes and deserts

ou can hear in the delaying rhythms of the opening sentence the influence of Marcel Proust and the digressive, paid-by-the-word style of Thomas De Quincey, whose essays Woolf had lately looked into for the first time

Why should I care that no one reads what I write? I write to forget about life, and I publish because that’s one of the rules of the game.

I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away.