Status Updates From A Room of One’s Own

“it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble […] without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks”

“Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quantity, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority”