"One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly"
About this Quote
Quoting, for Woolf, is less a noble act of citation than a mildly indecent exercise in smuggling. The line is comic because it treats taste and persuasion as physiology: you do not "share" a quotation, you secrete a substance to get it past someone else's gag reflex. That jelly is the softening agent of culture - the little prefaces, the charming anecdotes, the social signals ("you should read this") that make other people's sentences slide down as if they were your own idea.
The jab lands harder on writers than on readers. Woolf is admitting that even the most refined literary conversation involves manipulation: we wrap authority in sweetness. A quotation is a ready-made prestige object; it borrows a halo. The "too much jelly" is the tell. Overcompensation betrays insecurity, the fear that the naked line won't survive without padding. It is also a critique of the Edwardian habit of literary name-dropping, where quotes function as class markers as much as insight.
Context matters: Woolf wrote in a culture saturated with reverence for "great men" and their sententiae, while she was busy remaking the novel to capture consciousness rather than inherited wisdom. Her modernism distrusts the neat, finished aphorism. The subtext is a warning about intellectual digestion: quotations can nourish, but they can also be force-fed, turning reading into a polite choking hazard. The best line here is the most damning: the problem isn't jelly; it's our appetite for it.
The jab lands harder on writers than on readers. Woolf is admitting that even the most refined literary conversation involves manipulation: we wrap authority in sweetness. A quotation is a ready-made prestige object; it borrows a halo. The "too much jelly" is the tell. Overcompensation betrays insecurity, the fear that the naked line won't survive without padding. It is also a critique of the Edwardian habit of literary name-dropping, where quotes function as class markers as much as insight.
Context matters: Woolf wrote in a culture saturated with reverence for "great men" and their sententiae, while she was busy remaking the novel to capture consciousness rather than inherited wisdom. Her modernism distrusts the neat, finished aphorism. The subtext is a warning about intellectual digestion: quotations can nourish, but they can also be force-fed, turning reading into a polite choking hazard. The best line here is the most damning: the problem isn't jelly; it's our appetite for it.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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