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]

I love all Woolf's books you quoted (I love almost everything she wrote, and A Room of One's Own systematically brings me to tears at the end) but I would have thought Orlando is so much lighter. It's so fun and gender queer and everything.

And I tend to recognize sentences of authors I really like, or at least their style. My record was recognizing a citation from a book of Rilke (in an Italian translation, on the radio) after reading a different book by Rilke in German. (Rilke's prose is really very, very weird - and the citation was a blatant example).