“Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed...”
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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
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“Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed...”
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“If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautifu...”
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“He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.”
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“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
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“As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear, pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.”
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“Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.”
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“Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate...”
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“Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you.”
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“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?”
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“To love makes one solitary.”
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“I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.”
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“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”
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“Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”
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“To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away...”
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“It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”
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“I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”
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“She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, th...”
“And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.”
“Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we mig...”
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“By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”
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