A Room of One's Own

I read the book "A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf a while ago, and I just wanted to share my favorite quotes:


"When a subject is highly controversial-and any questions about sex is that- one cannot hope to tell the truth. 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."

"Women were not allowed in the library of Oxbridge unless accompanied by a Fellow of the college or with a letter of introduction (To think that not that long ago women were not allowed in certain places unsupervised is just crazy to me!)

"At the thought of all these women working year after year and finding it hard to get (the money for a girls college) together, and as much as they could do to get (the money), we burst out in scorn at the reprehensible poverty of our sex. What had our mothers windows? Flaunting in the sun at Monte Carlo?"

"Professors, schoolmasters, sociologists, clergymen, novelists, essayists, journalists, men who had no qualification save that they were not women, chased my simple and single question- why are women poor?"

"It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."

"Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything...it calls for confidence in oneself."

"What I find deplorable...is that nothing is known about women before the 18th century."

"There is no mark on the wall to measure the precise height of women. There are no yard measures neatly divided into the fractions of an inch, that one can lay against the quality of a good mother, or the devotion of a daughter, or the fidelity of a sister, or the capacity of a housekeeper. Few women even now have been graded at the universities; the great trials of the professions, army and navy, trade, politics, and diplomacy have hardly tested them. They remain even at this moment almost unclassified."