Quick: help

[sun_set_bravely]

Can anyone tell me that quote from Virginia Woolf about how it's a miracle that any art gets made, what with chores and family and friends and sleep etc.? I'm paraphrasing here, and I don't remember enough of the words to google it.

Help!

Comments

[eleanor.livejournal.com]

GOsh, I wish I could remember it. Personally, I"m of the opinion that people who write novels don't do laundry. They send it out or get someone else to do it, but they somply don't bother with it.

[daisydumont.livejournal.com]

couldn't find the exact quotation using google, but i found an interesting essay that deals at least partly with the idea:

room of her own

[nickelchief.livejournal.com]

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

I did a search on Bartleby.com and that's the closest match ...

'A Room of Ones Own'

[deminimis.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure this is the quote you are looking for.

And one gathers from this enormous modern literature of confession and self-analysis that to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer's mind whole and entire. Generally material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the worlds notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want. And so the writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially in creative years of youth, every form of distraction and discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony, rises from those books of analysis and confession. "Might poets in their misery dead"-that is the burden of their song. If anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived.

The next paragraph discusses the particular problems experienced by women in creating. Hope this helps.

Re: 'A Room of Ones Own'

[sun-set-bravely.livejournal.com]

This is it. Thank you so much! I tried thumbing through my copy, but I couldn't find the exact quote. It's much longer than I remembered it being!

Re: 'A Room of Ones Own'

[deminimis.livejournal.com]

You're welcome! It clicked with me this morning, but I had to wait to get home to look it up in my copy. I didn't think it was that long either, of course nearly every paragraph seems to cover a page. I remembered the last sentence, and luckily in my copy it's the first line on the page! If you would still like to find it in the book it's in chapter three paragraph eleven.

Another Woolf quote

[deminimis.livejournal.com]

Just thought I would share one of my favorite quotes.

When the day of judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards-their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble-the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.”