To love makes one solitary. - Virginia Woolf

I bought the blue paper book [Ulysses], & read it here one summer I think with spasms of wonder, of discovery, & then again with long lapses of immense boredom.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.