“He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”
1 likes
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 41-60 of 212
“He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”
1 likes
“I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed fee...”
“There it was before her - life. Life: she thought but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which...”
“First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.”
0 likes
“Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.”
0 likes
“The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
0 likes
“By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at stre...”
0 likes
“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”
“Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough...”
“Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure”
0 likes
“No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that an...”
0 likes
“Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung lik...”
0 likes
“in this case, a mother, noted for her beauty, might be reduced to a purple shadow... (Tansley to Lily on her painting of the house & grounds)”
“Nancy waded out to her own rocks and searched her own pools and let that couple look after themselves. She crouched low down and touched the smooth rubber-like sea anemones, who were stuck l...”
“Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?”
“If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance (...); as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in...”
“The only truth which she could discover was the truth of what she herself felt.”
0 likes
“It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Ei...”
0 likes
“the battered woman--for she wore a skirt--with her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love--love which has lasted a million years, she sang, love which prev...”
0 likes
“I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said. But he never liked anyone who--our friends,' said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had w...”
0 likes