A Room Of One's Own: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition

by Virginia Woolf

For Woolf is certain that the experience of men and the experience of women are extremely different, and they need different sentences to contain the shapes of their experience.

Women’s writing has, in addition, been impoverished by the limited access women have had to life:

Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction—so we are told.

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?—a

Les femmes sont extrêmes; elles sont meilleures ou pires que les hommes—

Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority.

for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination—over other people.

That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge.

need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.

Moreover, in a hundred years, I thought, reaching my own doorstep, women will have ceased to be the protected sex. Logically they will take part in all the activities and exertions that were once denied them.

A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.

“What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking.

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.

novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand,

For there is a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head which one can never see for oneself.

A true picture of man as a whole can never be painted until a woman has described that spot the size of a shilling.

a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilised and uses all its faculties.

They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom.

good writers, even if they show every variety of human depravity, are still good human beings.