“Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?”
More from Virginia Woolf
“I must open the little trap-door and let out these linked phrases in which I run together…”
“I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”
“They sang as if the edge of being were sharpened and must cut, must split the softness of…”
“I am like the foam that races over the beach or the moonlight that falls arrow-like here…”