A cultural divide?

[damigella]

"here encountering the first knot in the smooth skein of her argument." (V. Woolf, Orlando: A Biography)
"the smooth skein of his imagination had encountered the first knot:" (my fic A Member Of The Wedding)

How come quotations from Gone With The Wind, The Muppet Show or The Little Mermaid (Disney, not Andersen) are immediately recognized while a sentence lifted almost verbatim from Virginia Woolf goes unnoticed? 
Maybe I should use precise quotations. Maybe it's a US/UK issue. Feedback appreciated.

Comments

[damigella-314.livejournal.com]

Wow. Ukrainian. I can't read any Eastern European language at all. I can barely put together some version of good morning and thank you in Slovenian.

And I like your reading list. I'll skip GWTW (when Italians want to fill guilty we read about concentration camps not slavery - to each his own) but I might give Who Has Seen The Wind? by W.O. Mitchell, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood a try.

[pgrabia.livejournal.com]

Those are two of my favorite Canadian authors.

[damigella-314.livejournal.com]

I definitely do not read enough Canadian authors. Or Australian (at least I did read a lot by Katharine Mansfield).