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

by Virginia Woolf

I spare you the twists and turns of my cogitations, for no conclusion was found

Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction—so

the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women. Some of these books were, on the face of it, frivolous and facetious; but many, on the other hand, were serious and prophetic, moral and hortatory. Merely to read the titles suggested innumerable schoolmasters, innumerable clergymen mounting their platforms and pulpits and holding forth with a loquacity which far exceeded the hour usually allotted to such discourse on this one subject. It was a most strange phenomenon; and apparently—here I consulted the letter M—one confined to male sex.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Had anger, the black snake, been lurking among them?

They had been written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth.

Or is anger, I wondered, somehow, the familiar, the attendant sprite on power?

Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself.

was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself.

always to be doing work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave, flattering and fawning, not always necessarily perhaps, but it seemed necessary and the stakes were too great to run risks;

Or watch in the spring sunshine the stockbroker and the great barrister going indoors to make money and more money and more money when it is a fact that five hundred pounds a year will keep one alive in the sunshine.

and then in a year or two, pity and toleration went, and the greatest release of all came, which is freedom to think of things in themselves.

Decentering men, wrote here in 1929

that she is a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing perpetually.

That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women

The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility.

I valued what was good in Mrs. Fairfax, and what was good in Adèle; but I believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I believed in I wished to behold.

If one shuts one’s eyes and thinks of the novel as a whole, it would seem to be a creation owning a certain looking-glass likeness to life, though of course with simplifications and distortions innumerable.

It was the flaw in the center that had rotted them. She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others.

The fact is that neither Mr. Galsworthy nor Mr, Kipling has a spark of the woman in him. Thus all their qualities seem to a woman, if one may generalise, crude and immature. They lack suggestive power.

much of what flames in my eyes will seem dubious to you who have not yet come of age.

No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes.

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,

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast.

So that when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.

She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed.

if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think;