chatoyance:

“But was it nothing but looks? People said. What was there behind it—her beauty, her splendor? Or was there nothing? For easily though she might have said at some moment of intimacy when stories of great passion, of love foiled, of ambition thwarted came her way how she too had known or felt or been through it herself, she never spoke. She was silent always. She knew then—she knew without having learnt. Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified. Her singleness of mind made her drop plumb like a stone, alight exact like a bird, gave her, naturally, this swoop and fall of the spirit upon truth which delighted, eased—sustained, falsely perhaps. ‘But she’s no more aware of her beauty than a child,’ he thought. For always, there was something incongruous to be worked into the harmony of her face. She clapped a deerstalker hat on her head; she ran across the lawn in galoshes. So that if it was her beauty merely that one thought of, one must remember the quivering thing, the living thing, and work it into the picture; or if one thought of her simply as a woman, one must endow her some freak of idiosyncrasy; or suppose some latent desire to doff her royalty of form as if her beauty bored her and all that men say of beauty, and she wanted only to be like other people, insignificant.”

— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

(Source: fuckyeahvirginiawoolf, via rollingbackoutofoblivion)