Status Updates From Un cuarto propio

“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. We are all going to heaven and Vandyck is of the company—in other words, how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one's kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sunk among the cushions in the window-seat.”

“A true picture of a man as whole can never be painted until a woman has described that spot the size of a shilling.”

“The poet was forced to be passionate or bitter, unless indeed he cos’è to ‘hate women’, which meant more often than not that he was unattractive to them.”

“almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. […] and how small a part of a woman’s life is that; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or sort spectacles which sex puts upon his nose.”

“she was afraid […] of being called ‘sentimental’ perhaps; or she remembers that women’s writing has been called flowery and so provides a superfluity of thorns”

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

“This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feeling of women in a drawing-room.”

“One must submit to the social convention, and be ‘cut off from what is called the world’. At the same time, on the other side of Europe, there was a young man living freely with this gipsy or with that great lady; […] picking up unhindered and uncensored all that varied experience of human life which served him so splendidly later when he came to write his books.”

“Even if her father did not read out loud these opinion, any girl could read them for herself; and the reading […] must have lowered her vitality […]. There would always have been that assertion—you cannot do this, you are incapable of doing that—to protest against, to overcome.”

My brother has to read it for his prépa so I decided to read it too, what a good sister I am

(I nag him because he is a slow reader)