Modern Fiction Quotes

“Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant show of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, they accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning to the end.”
― Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction

“Learn to make yourself akin to people. . . . But let this sympathy be not with the mind--for it is easy with the mind--but with the heart, with love towards them.”
― Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction

“Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.”
― Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction

“Is life like this? Must novels be like this? Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being "like this".”
― Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction

“Is life like this? Must novels be like this? Look within and life, it seems, is very far demo being "like this".”
― Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction

“We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle.”
― Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction

“there is no limit to the horizon, and […] nothing – no ‘method’, no experiment, even of the wildest – is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence. ‘The proper stuff of fiction’ does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss”
― Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction

“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”
― Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction