quote · Legacy record
On January 18, 1915, six months into the First World War, as all Europe was convulsed by killing and dying, Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, 'The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.' Dark, she seems to be saying, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible. We often mistake the one for the other. Or we transform the future's unknowability into something certain, the fulfillment of all our dread, the place beyond which there is no way forward. Be again and again, far stranger things happen than the end of the world.
On January 18, 1915, six months into the First World War, as all Europe was convulsed by killing and dying, Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, 'The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.' Dark, she seems to be saying, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible. We often mistake the one for the other. Or we transform the future's unknowability into something certain, the fulfillment of all our dread, the place beyond which there is no way forward. Be again and again, far stranger things happen than the end of the world.
Approximate author period: c. 1961 AD · modern
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- Author or tradition
- Rebecca Solnit
Attribution: attributed - Country attributed
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- Approximate author period: c. 1961 AD · modern
Approximate author-period anchor from documented birth year 1961; activity date not established; Wikidata Q2134968, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2134968 (accessed 2026-10-08). Not a quotation composition date.
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Supplied reference C; CSV row 163542; supplied attribution, independently unverified
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