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“And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally this is so. Yet is it the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are "important"; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes "trivial." And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. 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 Room of One’s Own
― A Room of One’s Own
“The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if they had never been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought --to call it by a prouder name than it deserved-- had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until --you know the little tug -- the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating.”
― A Room of One’s Own
― A Room of One’s Own
“They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.”
― A Room of One’s Own
― A Room of One’s Own
“I’ve swapped disco lights for celestial lights but I’m still surrounded by dancers. I am orbited by sixty-seven moons.”
― The Outrun
― The Outrun
“And one gathers from this enormous modern literature of confession and self-analysis that to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer’s mind whole and entire, Generally material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world’s notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want. And so the writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially in the creative years of youth, every form of distraction and discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony, rises from those books of analysis and confession. “Mighty poets in their misery dead”—that is the burden of their song. If anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived.”
― A Room Of One's Own: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition
― A Room Of One's Own: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition
Inês’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Inês’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
860 books
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480 friends
33 books
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44 friends
1,029 books
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272 friends
1,457 books
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213 friends
409 books
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87 friends
67 books
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132 friends
242 books
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127 friends
1,040 books
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296 friends
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Art, Biography, Classics, Contemporary, Crime, Fiction, History, Memoir, Music, Mystery, Non-fiction, Philosophy, Poetry, Psychology, Romance, Science, and Spirituality
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