Virginia Woolf

First masculine, then feminine, Orlando begins life as a young sixteenth-century nobleman, then gallops through the centuries to end up as a woman writer in Virginia Woolf's own time. Written for the charismatic, bisexual writer Vita Sackville-West, this playful mock biography of a chameleon-like historical figure is both a wry commentary on gender and, in Woolf's own words, a 'writer's holiday' which delights in its ambiguity and capriciousness.

Orlando (Penguin Modern Classics)

Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?

sofia 🪆

Draculelle

Francesca 

Elena Menendez

He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath him; 

he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out. 

For the philosopher is right who says that nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy; 

all extremes of feeling are allied to madness

Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue. English was too frank, too candid, too honeyed a speech  

Orlando (Penguin Modern Classics) quotes

Join the club