A Room of One's Own quotes

One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.

Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.

Therefore I propose, making use of all the liberties and licences of a novelist, to tell you the story of the two days that preceded my coming here—how, bowed down by the weight of the subject which you have laid upon my shoulders, I pondered …

Instantly a man's figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation.

Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a Beadle; I was a woman.

This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment.

Was he really born so, or had he lost his tail in an accident? The tailless cat, though some are said to exist in the Isle of Man, is rarer than one thinks. It is a queer animal, quaint rather than beautiful.

It is strange what a difference a tail makes

—you know the sort of things one says as a lunch party breaks up and people are finding their coats and hats.

The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk.

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

The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes.

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

The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes.

We are all probably going to heaven, and Vandyck is, we hope, to meet us round the next corner—that is the dubious and qualifying state of mind that beef and prunes at the end of the day's work breed between them.

and I remembered how if one whistled one of them ran; and I thought of the organ booming in the chapel and of the shut doors of the library; and

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in;

and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer, I thought at last that it was …

One went to the counter; one took a slip of paper; one opened a volume of the catalogue, and . . . . . the five dots here indicate five separate minutes of stupefaction, wonder and bewilderment.

Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year?

Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

. . . . the five dots here indicate five separate minutes of stupefaction, wonder and bewilderment. Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men?

Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

Here had I come with a notebook and a pencil proposing to spend a morning reading, supposing that at the end of the morning I should have transferred the truth to my notebook.

This heat took many forms; it showed itself in satire, in sentiment, in curiosity, in reprobation. But there was another element which was often present and could not immediately be identified.

Anger, I called it. But it was anger that had gone underground and mixed itself with all kinds of other emotions.

To judge from its odd effects, it was anger disguised and complex, not anger simple and open.

Possibly they were not "angry" at all; often, indeed, they were admiring, devoted, exemplary in the relations of private life.

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.

That was what he was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price. Life for both sexes—and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement—is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle.

it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself.

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.

Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown.

Supermen and Fingers of Destiny would never have existed. The Czar and the Kaiser would never have worn crowns or lost them.

Whatever may be their use in civilised societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.

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. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men.

No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house and clothing are mine for ever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness.

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

So imperceptibly I found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race. It was absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole. Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

That building, for example, do I like it or not? Is that picture beautiful or not? Is that in my opinion a good book or a bad?

Indeed my aunt's legacy unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration, a view of the open sky.

So thinking, so speculating I found my way back to my house by the river. Lamps were being lit and an indescribable change had come over London since the morning hour.

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.

It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading the historians first and the poets afterwards—a worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up suet.

But these monsters, however amusing to the imagination, have no existence in fact. What one must do to bring her to life was to think poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch with fact—that she is Mrs.

How much thinking those old gentlemen used to save one! How the borders of ignorance shrank back at their approach!

Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.

Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this;

Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue.

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.

Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney, and George Eliot done homage to the robust shade of Eliza Carter—the valiant old woman who tied a bell to her bedstead in order that she might wake early and learn Greek.

It is she—shady and amorous as she was—who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you to-night:

Earn five hundred a year by your wits.

Here, then, one had reached the early nineteenth century. And here, for the first time, I found several shelves given up entirely to the works of women.

The extreme activity of mind which showed itself in the later eighteenth century among women—the talking, and the meeting, the writing of essays on Shakespeare, the translating of the classics—was founded on the solid fact that women could make money by writing.

Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.

It might still be well to sneer at "blue stockings with an itch for scribbling", but it could not be denied that they could put money in their purses.

But that emotion at once blends itself with others, for the "shape" is not made by the relation of stone to stone, but by the relation of human being to human being. Thus a novel starts in us all sorts of antagonistic and opposed emotions.

Life conflicts with something that is not life.

Hence the difficulty of coming to any agreement about novels, and the immense sway that our private prejudices have upon us. On the one hand, we feel You—John the hero—must live, or I shall be in the depths of despair.

One must have been something of a firebrand to say to oneself, Oh, but they can't buy literature too. Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass.

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.

But whatever effect discouragement and criticism had upon their writing—and I believe that they had a very great effect—that was unimportant compared with the other difficulty which faced them (I was still considering those early nineteenth-century novelists) when they came to set their thoughts on …

… compared with the other difficulty which faced them (I was still considering those early nineteenth-century novelists) when they came to set their thoughts on paper—that is that they had no tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help.

For we think back through our mothers if we are women.

It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure.

"Chloe liked Olivia," I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there.

Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature.

Cleopatra did not like Octavia. And how completely Antony and Cleopatra would have been altered had she done so!

We may all join in that pious hope, but it is doubtful whether poetry can come out of an incubator.

Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father.

The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the museum of some county town. Such monsters never live long, it is said;

. . a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born." That is it.

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

And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry.