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

by Virginia Woolf

Genius needs freedom; it cannot flower if it is encumbered by fear, or rancor, or dependency, and without money freedom is impossible.

The very reason why the poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.