If you’re looking for A Room of One’s Own quotes about feminism, you’ve come to the right place. Here at Inspiring Lizard we collect thought-provoking quotes from interesting people and sources. And in this article we share a list of the 15 most interesting A Room of One’s Own quotes about feminism from Virginia Woolf. Let’s get inspired!
A Room of One’s Own quotes about feminism
And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. (…) almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. (…) [women in fiction were] not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
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.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
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.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
My belief is that if we live another century or so — I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals — 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 and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Chastity … has, even now, a religious importance in a woman’s life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
It is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about. No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house, and clothing are mine forever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
I should never be able to fulfill what is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer-to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever”.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
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, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte 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. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
It is much more important to be oneself than anything else.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. (…) Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
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