“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
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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
Showing 181-200 of 212
“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
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“It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
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“The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.”
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“One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.”
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“A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.”
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“Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.”
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“There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.”
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“If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to p...”
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“It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.”
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“Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?”
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“Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.”
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“Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”
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“One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.”
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“I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.”
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“Language is wine upon the lips.”
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“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”
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“Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind...”
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“We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.”
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“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
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“The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.”
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