A Room of One's Own Quotes

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.

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

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

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

My belief is that if we live another century or so – I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals – and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think.

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.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.

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

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

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.