Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence. This is my professional opinion. Among her multitiude of never failing sentences, I'd like to share a few that can be found in a short piece on Dorothy Wordsworth collected within the "Common Reader" series:
"It is strange how vividly all this [her life with her brother and Coleridge around the time that they writing
Lyrical Ballads] is brought before us, considering that the diary is made up of brief notes such as any quiet woman might make of her garden’s changes and her brother’s moods and the progress of the seasons. It was warm and mild, she notes, after a day of rain. She met a cow in a field. “The cow looked at me, and I looked at the cow, and whenever I stirred the cow gave over eating.” She met an old man who walked with two sticks — for days on end she met nothing more out of the way than a cow eating and an old man walking. And her motives for writing are common enough —“because I will not quarrel with myself, and because I shall give William pleasure by it when he comes home again”. It is only gradually that the difference between this rough notebook and others discloses itself; only by degrees that the brief notes unfurl in the mind and open a whole landscape before us, that the plain statement proves to be aimed so directly at the object that if we look exactly along the line that it points we shall see precisely what she saw. “The moonlight lay upon the hills like snow.” “The air was become still, the lake of a bright slate colour, the hills darkening. The bays shot into the low fading shores. Sheep resting. All things quiet.” “There was no one waterfall above another — it was the sound of waters in the air— the voice of the air.” Even in such brief notes one feels the suggestive power which is the gift of the poet rather than of the naturalist, the power which, taking only the simplest facts, so orders them that the whole scene comes before us, heightened and composed, the lake in its quiet, the hills in their splendour. Yet she was no descriptive writer in the usual sense. Her first concern was to be truthful — grace and symmetry must be made subordinate to truth. But then truth is sought because to falsify the look of the stir of the breeze on the lake is to tamper with the spirit which inspires appearances. It is that spirit which goads her and urges her and keeps her faculties for ever on the stretch. A sight or a sound would not let her be till she had traced her perception along its course and fixed it in words, though they might be bald, or in an image, though it might be angular. Nature was a stern taskmistress. The exact prosaic detail must be rendered as well as the vast and visionary outline."
The complete piece can be found here:
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301251h.html#e17
