Time & Perspective Quote by Lalla Ward

Ward is talking about “unexpected” the way a working actor would: not as a plot twist, but as a voice you can feel in your body. The surprise she “really love[s]” isn’t the content of a book so much as the experience of its sentences arriving differently than expected - rhythm, texture, point of view, the whole engine of perception. It’s a performer’s definition of literary innovation: writing that changes how time moves in your head.

The Woolf and Durrell references sharpen the point. Woolf’s modernist interiority doesn’t just tell you what a character thinks; it reconfigures attention, making consciousness itself the setting. Durrell, especially in The Alexandria Quartet, makes narrative feel like refracted light - the same events, rearranged through competing angles, sensuous and unstable. Ward’s examples signal that she’s after form as discovery, not form as homework. The subtext: the best books aren’t “relatable,” they’re disorienting in a pleasurable way, teaching you new receptors.

Context matters, too. As an actor associated with genre TV and big popular franchises, Ward is gently pushing back against the assumption that “serious” reading has to be solemn or dutiful. She frames literary challenge as delight - the private thrill of opening a book and realizing the rules just changed. That’s a cultural stance: defending difficulty not as status, but as joy.