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

[pgrabia.livejournal.com]

I've never read Virginia Woolf and I read Gone With the Wind when I was nine. But I have read classics lie Persuasion by Jane Austen, The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Who Has Seen The Wind? by W.O. Mitchell, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Also, George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm. Anything Shakespeare I'd probably recognize. But no Woolf or Charlotte or Emilie Bronte. So is it cultural? I don't don't know. I've read Ukrainian literature (in Ukrainian) and other foreign literature (translated to English. I've never been good with foreign languages though I did take a little German in university).

Edited because I hit the return button by mistake:-o

[pgrabia.livejournal.com]

Oh, and my daughter saw my list and accused me of watching the movies and not reading the books but it's untrue! I have read the books, always before the movies, which I then found disappointing in comparison.

[damigella-314.livejournal.com]

I think your daughter and my daughter would have fun together. They seem to have the same deep-seated respect bordering on fear towards their mothers, lol.

[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).