Balance between Recklessness and Control

"I was ready, however-or maybe I should say I was ready to be ready-for Woolf's sentences. I had not only never seen language like that; nothing I'd read had prepared me for the fact that a human being could do what she had done, line by line, using the same ink and paper available to anybody. I had neither read nor conceived of sentences that complex and muscular and precise and beautiful. It may, preversely, have helped that I didn't quite understand what the sentences actually meant. It may have helped free me to better appreciate their tones and variations, the sheer virtuosity of their structures and sounds. I remember thinking, Hey, she was doing with language something like what Jimi Hendrix does with a guitar. Riffing, that is, as only a genius can; finding over and over again an exquisite balance between recklessness and control, between chaos and pattern."

-Michael Cunningham, on reading Virginia Woolf for the first time at 15. From Mentors, Muses, and Monsters:30 writers and the people who changed their lives.