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A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf Quotes

Virginia Woolf

Quote 4

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters. [...] But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand [...] is the most abject treachery. (6.11)

Treachery against whom, or what? Yourself? Women? Would you agree that women really have a obligation to their gender, or is it every woman for herself?

Virginia Woolf

Quote 5

Intellectual freedom depends on material things. Poetry depends on intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. [...] Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. (6.14)

If you were waiting for Woolf to state the point of the book in a nutshell, your wait is over. This is it. You can't have good poetry without good food.

Virginia Woolf

Quote 6

If we live another century or so [...] and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting room [...] then [...] the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. (6.23)

Coming soon: A Room of One's Own Part II: Judith Shakespeare's Zombie Army.