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".

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.

It is much more important to be oneself than anything else.

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.

What is meant by 'reality'? It would seem something very erratic$$$ very undependable-now to be found in a dusty road$$$ now in a scrap of newspaper in the street$$$ now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech-and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Picadilly.

... All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame$$$ and it is they who drive me$$$ when I want to stretch my faculties on a book$$$ to seek it in that happy age ... when the writer used both sides of his mind [the male and female sides of his mind] equally. One must turn back to Shakespeare then$$$ for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Jonson had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoy.

What one means by integrity$$$ in the case of the novelist$$$ is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. . . . When one so exposes it [integrity] and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture$$$ But this is what I have always felt and known and desired! And one boils over with excitement$$$ and$$$ shutting the book even with a kind of reverence as if it were something very precious$$$ a stand-by to return to as long as one lives$$$ one puts it back on the shelf.

Freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art.

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

Literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women