“She, who believed in no immortality, could not help feeling that her soul would come and go for ever with the reds on the panels and the greens on the sofa. For the room—she had strolled into the Ambassador’s bedroom—shone like a shell that has lain at the bottom of the sea for centuries and has been crusted over and painted a million tints by the water; it was rose and yellow, green and sand-coloured. It was frail as a shell, as iridescent and as empty.”

—Virginia Wolfe, from Orlando, 1928.