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Favorite Quotations
Brown Eyes:
And... here's one more for tonight.
Quoting Virginia Woolf can be hard because of her stream-of-consciousness style and unconventional sentence structure. But, she's pretty much my favorite writer. In her literature she deals with so many aspects of women's lives, relationships and thought processes in such subtle ways... to me it's just amazing. In her polemical writing like A Room of One's Own,she's much more straightforward in her language, questions, etc. But, I think this is such a great passage from To the Lighthouse (1927) where a mother raised in the Victorian age is contemplating her daughters of the Edwardian age/ early 20th century during a dinner party...
"They must find a way out of it all. There might be some simpler way, some less laborious way, she sighed. When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey, her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have managed things better - her husband; money; his books. But for her own part she would never for a single second regret her decision, evade difficulties, or slur over duties. She was now formidable to behold, and it was only in silence looking up from their plates, after she had spoken so severely... [to] her daughters, Prue, Nancy, Rose - [who] could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other; for there was in their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry, of the Bank of England and the Indian Empire, of ringed fingers and lace..."
Brown Eyes:
“Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation or social standards never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest are willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathies with despised ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.”
-Susan B. Anthony
Front-Ranger:
I love these quotes!
Brown Eyes:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on November 16, 2008, 01:48:03 am ---I love these quotes!
--- End quote ---
Thanks Sister Mod! :D
Definitely feel free to add your own favorites here too!
Brown Eyes:
--- Quote from: Scott on November 18, 2008, 12:25:15 pm ---"The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, 'It's a girl.' "
~Shirley Chisholm
--- End quote ---
That's great Scott! It's also interesting to think of the flip side of this being just as true... stereotyping for boys starts with the doctor's declaration too.
OK, more from Woolf:
"And, determined to do my duty by her as a reader if she would do her duty by me as writer, I turned the page and read... I am sorry to break off so abruptly. Are there no men present? Do you promise me that behind that red curtain over there the figure of Sir Chartres Biron is not concealed? We are all women, you assure me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these -- 'Chloe liked Olivia...' Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women."
-from A Room of One's Own, 1929 (based on two papers delivered as lectures in 1928)
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