A Quote by Virginia Woolf

Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.

Virginia Woolf

Quote Topics

About Antony Austen Bitterness Both Compare Consumed Does Every Fear Had Hate How Impediments Jane Know Looking May Mean Minds People Preaching Protest Reason Shakespeare She Thought Without Woman Word Writing Wrote Year

Quote Author

Virginia Woolf
British - Author
January 25, 1882 - March 28, 1941

I once rented the Georgian town house that Jane Austen lived in down by the Holburne Museum - so I lived in Jane Austen's house, and slept in Jane Austen's bedroom. You can walk along these Georgian streets and it's like you're in a Jane Austen period drama.

Lucy Worsley

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.

Virginia Woolf

I'm totally in love with Jane Austen and have always been in love with Jane Austen. I did my dissertation at university on black people in eighteenth-century Britain - so I'd love to do a Jane Austen-esque film but with black people.

Naomie Harris

I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.

Anne Stevenson

I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen. My fatuous expression, and airs of personal immunity-how ill they sit on the face, say,of a Stevensonian! But Jane Austen is so different. She is my favourite author! I read and reread, the mouth open and the mind closed. Shut up in measureless content, I greet her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers.

E. M. Forster

I think Jane Austen is like Shakespeare, in a slightly different way. I think people will continue to revisit these stories because they remain relevant, regardless of how you do them.

Josh O'Connor

What’s ready? Was Steinback ready? Hemingway? Shakespeare? Dickens? Jane Austen? They just did it, didn’t they?

Danielle Steel

The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book.

Simon Schama

You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare

Erica Jong

I've been fortunate in that I never actually read any Jane Austen until I was thirty, thus sparing myself several decades of the unhappiness of having no new Jane Austen novels to read.

Cathleen Schine

Jane Austen wrote six of the most beloved novels in the English language, we are informed at the end of Becoming Jane, and so she did. The key word is beloved. Her admirers do not analyze her books so much as they just plain love them to pieces.

Roger Ebert

I actually didn't like Jane Austen. I was more into the Brontes. They were so wild and passionate. I thought there was something a bit tame about Austen.

Frances O'Connor

And I love Jane Austen's use of language too--the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom in my mind. Beethoven does the same thing with his cadence and phrasing and structure. It's a fact: Jane Austen is musical. And so's Yeats. And Wordsworth. All the great writers are musical.

Andrew Clements

One doesn't read Jane Austen; one re-reads Jane Austen.

William F. Buckley, Jr.

I believe strongly in what John Keats called negative capability: the trait or practice that allows a poet to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. For Keats, William Shakespeare exemplified negative capability, and I do think it's extraordinary that for all the thousands of pages Shakespeare left behind, we really don't know much about Shakespeare's own personality or opinions.

James Arthur

There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare.

Margaret Drabble

A Quote by Virginia Woolf

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors