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

by Virginia Woolf

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.

And, I wondered, would Pride and Prejudice have been a better novel if Jane Austen had not thought it necessary to hide her manuscript from visitors?

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.

I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.

Thus when I ask you to write more books I am urging you to do what will be for your good and for the good of the world at large.

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.