❝When I Am Grown Up I Shall Carry A Notebook–a Fat Book With Many Pages, Methodically Lettered. I

❝When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook–a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.❞

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Virginia Woolf, mid-twentieth century:

❝[L]et us take down one of those old notebooks which we have all, at one time or another, had a passion for beginning.

Most of the pages are blank, it is true; but at the beginning we shall find a certain number very beautifully covered with a strikingly legible hand-writing. Here we have written down the names of great writers in their order of merit; here we have copied out fine passages from the classics; here are lists of books to be read; and here, most interesting of all, lists of books that have actually been read, as the reader testifes with some youthful vanity by a dash of red ink.❞

— Virginia Woolf, "Hours in a Library". Granite and Rainbow: Essays by Virginia Woolf (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1958),p.25.