A Room of One”s Own
by
Virginia Wolf

“For genius like Shakespeare”s is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people.” p. 48.

“Currer Bell, George Eliot, Sand, all victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man. Thus, they did homage to the convention, which if not implemented by the other sex was liberally encouraged by them (the chief glory of a woman is not be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of-man), the publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possess them.” [Italics my own.] p. 50

“What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. Yes, one feels, I should never have thought that this could be so; I have never known people behaving like that. But you have convinced me that so it is, so it happens.” p. 72.

“The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating. If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties.”

“When a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.” p. 102.

“Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. 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, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.” p. 106.