“ It was too big for him, that was the truth. It had never really progressed, it had simply fallen apart into a series of fragments. And out of two years’ work that was all that he had to show - just fragments, incomplete in themselves and impossible to join together. On every one of those sheets of paper there was some hacked scrap of verse which had been written and rewritten and rewritten over intervals of months. There were not five hundred lines that you could say were definitely finished. And he had lost the power to add to it any longer; he could only tinker with this passage or that, groping now and here, now there, in its confusion. It was no longer a thing that he created, it was merely a nightmare with which he struggled.
—
George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Anyone who has poured their soul and years of their time into writing a novel can probably relate to Orwell’s idealistic Gordon Comstock.
(via fortuneandglory)
