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121 " Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself. "
― Virginia Woolf , Monday or Tuesday
122 " Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics. "
― Virginia Woolf , A Room of One's Own
123 " For we think back through our mothers if we are women. "
― Virginia Woolf
124 " This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. "
125 " 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. "
126 " 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. "
127 " 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 "
128 " One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man "
129 " Literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women "
130 " 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 "
131 " A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life. "
132 " I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. "
133 " For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty. "
134 " It seems comfortable to sink down on a sofa in a corner, to look, to listen. Then it happens that two figures standing with their backs against the window appear against the branches of a spreading tree. With a shock of emotion one feels 'There are figures without features robed in beauty'. In the pause that follows while the ripples spread, the girl to whom one should be talking says to herself, 'He is old'. But she is wrong. It is not age; it is that a drop has fallen; another drop. Time has given the arrangement another shake. Out we creep from the arch of the currant leaves, out into a wider world. The true order of things – this is our perpetual illusion – is now apparent. Thus in a moment, in a drawing-room, our life adjusts itself to the majestic march of day across the sky. "
― Virginia Woolf , The Waves
135 " Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent. "
136 " How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger? "
137 " One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy. "
― Virginia Woolf , To the Lighthouse
138 " It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on. "
139 " I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh. "
― Virginia Woolf , The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Two, 1912-1922
140 " In the flailing light they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances "