Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own (1929)

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Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?

Virginia Woolf
Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.

Virginia Woolf
Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.

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

Virginia Woolf
If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man; some think even greater.

Virginia Woolf
Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?

Virginia Woolf
It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.

Virginia Woolf
Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them.

Virginia Woolf
Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness.

Virginia Woolf
For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.

Virginia Woolf
In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.

Virginia Woolf
This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A Scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop

Virginia Woolf