“The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.”
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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 161-180 of 212
“The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.”
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“Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.”
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“Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.”
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“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?”
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“Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dul...”
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“That great Cathedral space which was childhood.”
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“Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
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“It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.”
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“Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and...”
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“For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?”
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“If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?”
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“I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.”
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“The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.”
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“The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.”
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“A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.”
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“It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”
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“Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.”
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“Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.”
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“Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.”
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“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
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