Odd Affinities Virginia Woolf's Shadow Genealogies

The book grew day by day, week by week, without any plan at all, except that which was dictated each morning in the act of writing. The other way, to make a house and then inhabit it, to develop a theory and then apply it, as Wordsworth did and Coleridge, is, it need not be said, equally good and much more philosophic. But in the present case it was necessary to write the book first and to invent a theory afterwards.
Virginia Woolf, "Introduction," Mrs. Dalloway
If you look for things that are like the things that you have looked for before, then, obviously, they'll connect up. But they'll only connect up in an obvious sort of way, which actually isn't, in terms of writing something new, very productive. So you have to take heterogeneous materials in order to get your
mind to do something it hasn't done before.
W. G. Sebald, in Joseph Cuomo, "A Conversation with W. G. Sebald"
What I've learned in these past few years, is that when we make something, whether it's a painting, a letter, a connection with someone, or even just a memory, we don't yet know what the legacy of that creation will be-we don't know what it might come to mean to ourselves or to someone else in the future.
Kabe Wilson, Looking for Virginia: An Artist's Journey through 100 Archives