23 Oct 2014

Bookshop mystery.

In the secondhand bookshop where I first started a new career fourteen years ago I found a collection of Virginia Woolf’s early writings. I’m enjoying them though the style is so different to today’s writings that it is almost archaic. What has also come to me as a result of this purchase is the tantalising inscription, scribbled on the front free endpaper, to “Sandra:

‘Detachment is the last refuge of compassion, to step away from pain and observe is the only gift of an artists/scientist. He was well loved and love knows no guilt, no shame, no betrayal, only itself.’


I suppose it to be a quote from one of the stories but haven’t found it yet. I looked it up as a quote in the usual place. No luck so far. My curiousity whisker has been tickled.