David Garnett

“ In the art of painting subject is probably of no importance: but the aesthetic of writing is different. Not only must a poem or story have some sort of subject, but, even though they cannot be graded like apples, some subjects are more important than others. And the failure of Ulysses is that it is full of subjects of practically no aesthetic value, not that it is full of obscene words. This is all very relevant to Jacob's Room, for Mrs Woolf is incapable of Mr Joyce's offence. She can touch only what will move us aesthetically. ”

“ Long past sunset an old blind woman sat on a campstool with her back to the stone wall of the Union of London and Smith's Bank, clasping a brown mongrel tight in her arms and singing out loud, not for coppers, no, from the depths of her gay wild heart—her sinful tanned heart, for the child who fetches her is the fruit of sin, and should have been in bed, curtained, asleep, instead of hearing in the lamplight her mother's wild song, where she sits against the Bank, singing not for coppers, with the dog against her breast. ”

“ In Jacob's Room the task that Virginia Woolf has set herself is "to create Jacob's environment, to approach him on this side and on that, so that the surroundings evoke Jacob about whom she does not tell us very much directly.
"Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain, the flowers in the jars shift. One fibre in the wicker armchair creaks though no one sits there. ”