Lauren Elkin

The things that are the most fascinating can be the most hurtful.

Twenty years old is like forty, that way. The person we’re losing always feels like the last person who’ll want us.

The one at Gordon Square reads:

For Woolf, Bloomsbury was not only a geographical neighbourhood but an abstract entity, an idea about creativity and bohemianism and an idea about freedom.

In The Waves, this becomes: ‘I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.’32 The jangle and shuffle of London is the heartbeat of life itself

An old beggar woman, blind, sat against a stone wall in Kingsway holding a brown mongrel in her arms & sang aloud.

London. Defiant – almost gay, clasping her dog as if for warmth

Nowadays I’m often overcome by London; even think of the dead who have walked in the city … The view of the grey white spires from Hungerford Bridge brings it to me: & yet I can’t say what ‘it’ is.

once we were the objects of the gaze, as street haunters we become observing entities, de-sexed, un-gendered. We cloak ourselves in anonymity, and become as incomprehensible to the city as it often is to us.

But just as important as what she sees is what the walk does to her sense of self.