Isabel’s Reviews > A Room of One's Own > Status Update

“I am reminded by dipping into newspapers and novels and biographies that when a woman speaks to women she should have something very unpleasant up her sleeve. Women are hard on women. Women dislike women. […] What can I think of? The truth is, I often like women.”

“Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor”

“Then Alan got up and the shadow of Alan at once obliterated Phoebe. For Alan had views and Phoebe was quenched in the flood of his views.”

“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.”