It becomes an obsession

[breathedout]

Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh, if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures–there is something sexual in it–that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession.

—Virginia Woolf in a letter to Roger Fry, 6 May 1922