A Room of One's Own > Quotes

"Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man, at twice its natural size. "
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"...a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is going to write..."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation..."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. She died young—alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross–roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to–night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so—I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals—and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting–room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky. too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would he impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"...who shall measure the heat and violence of a poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?"
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
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— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?"
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. "
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women..."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"...but after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter 'I.' One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking I was not quite sure. Back one was always hailed to the letter 'I."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"...the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)