(passages)

by Virginia Woolf “This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me.”

“Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction — so we are told .”

“If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is truth?”

“How shall I ever find the grains of truth embedded in all this mass of paper.”

“Women do not write books about men.”

“Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”

“Why does Samuel Butler say, ‘Wise men never say what they think of women’?”

“One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man.”

“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.”

“[Men] start the day confident, braced, believing themselves desired at Miss Smith’s tea party; they say so themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they speak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have had such profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious notes in the margin of the private mind.”

“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 labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me.”

“In a hundred years, I thought, reaching my own doorstep, women will have ceased to be the protected sex.”

“Imaginatively, [a woman] is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history.”

“Five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate, . . . a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself.”

“Women are hard on women. Women dislike women.”

” . . . the habit of freedom . . . “

” . . . 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 . . . “