"There was a period, stretched out as it was over many years – time’s
bloomers, after all, having strong elastic – when Orlando felt far from
trifling, like maybe the most solid thing any writer could offer a
teenage reader. It gave reliable faith in everything being true all at
once: boy and girl, bloodline and blood pulse, England and everywhere
else, solitude and society, literature and living, the quick and the
slow, the quick and the dead, now and then, a trick of the light."
