“But can we go to posterity with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those days, with the whole of literature before them, to sift our enormous rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls? Such are the questions which the critics might lawfully put to their companions at table, the novelists and poets.”

"How It Strikes a Contemporary"
The Common Reader (1925)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 27, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "But can we go to posterity with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those days, with the whole of literature …" by Virginia Woolf?
Virginia Woolf photo
Virginia Woolf 382
English writer 1882–1941

Related quotes

Robert Falcon Scott photo

“The Beardmore Glacier is not difficult in fine weather, but on our return we did not get a single completely fine day; this with a sick companion enormously increased our anxieties.”

Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912) Royal Navy officer and explorer

Journal, 29 March 1912 http://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/museum/diaries/scottslastexpedition/

Joseph Addison photo
Carolina de Robertis photo

“We do our characters a disservice by allowing them to be flat. Our role as novelists is to do our best to portray the nuance of a whole range of life experiences. It’s one of the things that fiction is uniquely positioned to do, to bring the reader into the interior life of people’s experiences that are wildly different than our own…”

Carolina de Robertis (1975) American writer

On creating rounded characters in “A Conversation with Carolina De Robertis on Immigration, Sexuality, and the True Origins of the Tango” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/conversation-carolina-de-robertis-immigration-sexuality-true-origins-tango/ in Los Angeles Review of Books (2016 Apr 20)

John Maynard Keynes photo
Thomas Merton photo
Owen Wister photo

“Forgive my asking you to use your mind. It is a thing which no novelist should expect of his reader…”

Owen Wister (1860–1938) American writer

Source: The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains

Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
George Sand photo

“We cannot tear a single page from our life, but we can throw the whole book into the fire.”

Nous ne pouvons arracher une seule page de notre vie, mais nous pouvons jeter le livre au feu.
Source: Mauprat, ch. 11 (1837); Matilda M. Hays (trans.) Mauprat (London: E. Churton, 1847) p. 121

Related topics