“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
Author detail
Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, diarist, epistler, publisher, feminist, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. ([Source][1].) [Comment from Ursula Le Guin on The Guardian][2]: > You can't write science fiction well if you haven't read it, though not all who try to write it know this. But nor can you write it well if you haven't read anything else. Genre is a rich dialect, in which you can say certain things in a particularly satisfying way, but if it gives up connection with the general literary language it becomes a jargon, meaningful only to an ingroup. Useful models may be found quite outside the genre. I learned a lot from reading the ever-subversive Virginia Woolf. > I was 17 when I read [Orlando][3]. It was half-revelation, half-confusion to me at that age, but one thing was clear: that she imagined a society vastly different from our own, an exotic world, and brought it dramatically alive. I'm thinking of the Elizabethan scenes, the winter when the Thames froze over. Reading, I was there, saw the bonfires blazing in the ice, felt the marvellous strangeness of that moment 500 years ago – the authentic thrill of being taken absolutely elsewhere. > How did she do it? By precise, specific descriptive details, not heaped up and not explained: a vivid, telling imagery, highly selected, encouraging the reader's imagination to fill out the picture and see it luminous, complete. > In [Flush][4], Woolf gets inside a dog's mind, that is, a non-human brain, an alien mentality – very science-fictional if you look at it that way. Again what I learned was the power of accurate, vivid, highly selected detail. I imagine Woolf looking down at the dog asleep beside the ratty armchair she wrote in and thinking what are your dreams? and listening . . . sniffing the wind . . . after the rabbit, out on the hills, in the dog's timeless world. > Useful stuff, for those who like to see through eyes other than our own. [1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf [2]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/14/science-fiction-authors-choice [3]: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL39360W/Orlando [4]: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL39320W/Flush
Quotes
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“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
“Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”
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“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
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“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
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“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”
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“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the pas...”
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“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”
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“The great cathedral space which was childhood.”
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“I have lost friends, some by death ... others by sheer inability to cross the street.”
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“Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.”
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“When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.”
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“Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.”
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“Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning.”
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“A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.”
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“Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.”
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“The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length;...”
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“It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”
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