Status Updates From Un cuarto propio

“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, […] then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, […] some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.”

“She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she’s all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. […] some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read”

“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”