9 Quotes from Virginia Woolf’s Must-Read Essay, ‘A Room of One’s Own’ That I Couldn’t Stop Thinking About
After sitting on my bedside table for the last five years or so, I finally read my 1957 edition of A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, and WOW. What an essay. It’s an absolute must-read for any woman who is independent and desires to be a creative (not just a writer). I highly recommend the audiobook narrated by Juliet Stevenson, which I listened to alongside the physical copy. This felt so relevant, which is crazy to think something almost 100 years old (first published in 1929), is still very poignant today. I wanted to compile a list of some of my favorite takeaway quotes from this essay that felt beautiful, or melancholy, or just true. These will definitely stay with me. They might also resonate with my fellow women. You’ll find them below. Enjoy and keep fighting for a room of your own, my lovelies.
MEMORABLE QUOTES
“All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
“It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in windowpanes like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish…has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
“Truth has run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.”
“Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”
“But this is women in fiction…A very queer composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is 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 inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.”
“One must have been something of a firebrand to say to oneself, ‘Oh, but they can’t buy literature too. Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass. 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.”
“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 be manage with one only?
“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters, and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”
“I like reading books in the bulk…Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.”
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