A Room of One's Own Mary Beton Quotes

Still the same flow of gold and silver went on; fellowships we founded; lectureships endowed [...] Hence the libraries and the laboratories; the observatories; the splendid equipment of costly and delicate instruments which now stands on glass shelves. (1.5)

What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us? Powdering their noses? Looking in at shop windows? [...] Mary's mother [...] may have been a wastrel in her spare time (she had thirteen children by a minister of the church), but if so her gay and dissipated life had left too few traces of it pleasures on her face. (1.28)

That collar I had spoken of, women and fiction, the need of coming to some conclusion on a subject that raises all sorts of prejudices and passions, bowed my head to the ground. (1.2)

I thought about the organ booming in the chapel and of the shut doors of the library; and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in. (1.31)

I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man's figure rose to intercept me [...] He was a Beadle, I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. (1.3)

Here I was actually at the door which leads into the library itself [...] Instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with a flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library of if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction. (1.4)

Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists, but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex—woman, that is to say—also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women. (2.2)

For that visit to Oxbridge and the luncheon and the dinner had started a swarm of questions. Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? (2.1)

No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house, and clothing are mine for ever. Therefore not merely do effort and labor cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me. (2.14)

Merely to read the titles [of books by men about women] suggested innumerable schoolmasters, innumerable clergymen mounting their platforms and pulpits [...] Women do not write books about men. (2.2)

Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. It must be one of the chief sources of his power. (2.12)

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. (2.12)

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, of a suppressed poet. (3.8)

Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Brontë. It is another feather, perhaps the finest, in their caps. They wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue—write this, think that. (4.32)

It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? (5.11)

All of these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded, I said, [...] and went on in thought through the streets of London feeling in imagination the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners with their arms akimbo [...] or from the violet-sellers and match-sellers and old crones stationed under doorways. (5.14)

If one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilisation, she becomes, on the contrary, alien and critical. (6.3)

What were the conditions in which women lived [during the Elizabethan era], I asked myself; for fiction [...] is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. (3.2)

For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been. (5.8)

Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can be accomplished. [...] The whole of the mind must lie wide open [...] The writer, I thought, once his experience is over, must lie back and let his mind celebrate its nuptials in darkness. (6.9)