Quotes About Literature

Una mujer debe tener dinero y una habitación propia para poder escribir novelas; y esto, como veis, deja sin resolver el gran problema de la verdadera naturaleza de la mujer y la verdadera naturaleza de la novela.

It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure.

It's books, sighed Helen, lifting an armful of sad volumes from the floor to the shelf. Greek from morning to night. If ever Miss Rachel marries, Chailey, pray that she may marry a man who doesn't know his ABC.

Chloe liked Olivia,' I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature.

All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point — a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

he truth is that writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.

In the same way once a book is printed and published it ceases to be the property of the author; he commits it to the care of other people;

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces. The shade of green Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme and split his metre.

They wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue – write this, think that.

The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together

Many friends have helped me in writing this book. Some are dead and so illustrious that I scarcely dare name them, yet no one can read or write without being perpetually in the debt of Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily Bronte, De Quincey, and Walter Pater — to name the first that come to mind. Others are alive, and though perhaps as illustrious in their own way, are less formidable for that very reason.

Charlotte Brontë, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane Austen looked at it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it. Thus, with less genius for writing than Charlotte Brontë, she got infinitely more said.

Si doveva avere la tempra di una testa calda per dire a se stesse, Oh, ma non possono comprare anche la letteratura. La letteratura è aperta a tutti. Non ti riconosco l'autorità, anche se sei il guardiano, di scacciarmi dal prato. Chiudete pure a chiave le vostre biblioteche se volete, ma non c'è cancello, serratura o chiavistello che possiate mettere alla libertà della mia mente.

If one shuts one's eyes and thinks of the novel as a whole, it would seem to be a creation owning a certain looking-glass likeness to life, though of course with simplifications and distortions innumerable.

Tenéis alguna noción de cuántos libros se escriben al año sobre las mujeres?

Il gusto per i libri era nato presto in lui. Fanciullo, un paggio lo trovava talvolta a mezzanotte ancora intento a leggere. Gli toglievano il candelabro, ed egli allevava delle lucciole per sostituirlo. Gli toglievano le lucciole, ed egli per poco non metteva a fuoco la casa con una esca. Per dirla in nuce, lasciando al novelliere la cura di spianar le infinite pieghe della seta delle nostre anime, Orlando era un aristocratico malato d'amore per la letteratura.

No se sabe lo que ocurrirá cuando el ser mujer ya no sea una ocupación protegida, pensé abriendo la puerta. Pero ¿qué tiene todo esto que ver con el tema de mi conferencia, las mujeres y la novela?, me pregunté entrando en casa.

it is necessary to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry.

Il suo gusto per i libri era stato precoce. Da bambino, a volte un paggio lo trovava, a mezzanotte, ancora intento a leggere. [...] Per dirla in breve, Orlando era un nobile malato d'amore per la letteratura.

Thus, when one takes a sentence of Mr B into the mind it falls plump to the ground— dead; but when one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life.

Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote

Virginia Woolf

las mujeres y la novela son dos problemas que no he resuelto.

She was haunted by the ghosts of phrases. She gave herself up to a sensual delight in the combinations of words. She sought them in the pages of her favorite authors.