"Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the..." - Quote by Virginia Woolf
Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For 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 the single voice.
More by Virginia Woolf
“Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred.”
“Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.”
“Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves.”
More on Literature
“An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive atthe precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary.”
“There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly.”
“So there you have it, a lifetime of first smelling the books, they all smell wonderful, reading the books, loving the books, and remembering the books.”