A Room of Our Own

“No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.” – Dead Poets Society.

“a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”

“But for women, I thought, looking at the empty shelves, these difficulties were infinitely more formidable.  In the first place, to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound–proof room, was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning of the nineteenth century.  Since her pin money, which depended on the goodwill of her father, was only enough to keep her clothed, she was debarred from such alleviations as came even to Keats or Tennyson or Carlyle, all poor men, from a walking tour, a little journey to France, from the separate lodging which, even if it were miserable enough, sheltered them from the claims and tyrannies of their families.  Such material difficulties were formidable; but much worse were the immaterial. The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility.  The world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me.  The world said with a guffaw, Write? What’s the good of your writing? . . . For surely it is time that the effect of discouragement upon the mind of the artist should be measured”

"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."

"So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life, and whether this is living."

~ Virginia Woolf