I am in an odd state; feel a cleavage; here’s my interesting thing; and there’s no quite solid table on which to put it. It might come in a flash, on re-reading—some solvent. I am convinced that I am right to seek for a station whence I can set my people against time and the sea—but Lord, the difficulty of digging oneself in there, with conviction. Yesterday I had conviction; it has gone today.
— Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 2 November 1929