Virginia Woolf's Recorded Voice on Language

No other woman in the history of literature was more obsessed with the everyday consciousness of the human mind than Virginia Woolf. You go to Joyce for linguistic and literary exercises as a ballet dancer would go to a dance school. But you don't go to Joyce for life. No; that you must go to Virginia Woolf. Her language - her words - was the language of life as the waves were her language of the past and reality. As with any great writer, Virginia Woolf made her language into her own encapsulated and yet luminous universe. We see ourselves more clearly in her than any other writer of her generation. Perhaps even today.