There is never a complete beast

[breathedout]

I thought to myself, as Lytton was talking, Now I will remember this & write it down in my diary tomorrow. And as I thought that, everything melted to mist. People don’t say things, except in biographies. True, Lytton was smooth & mild & melancholy beyond his wont; but with intimates, when talk is interesting, one sentence melts into another; heads & tails merge; there is never a complete beast.

—Virginia Woolf in her diary, Wednesday 15 February 1922