# Quote — Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

> [Women] Are they capable of education or incapable? Napoleon thought them incapable. Dr. Johnson thought the opposite. Have they souls or have they not souls? Some savages say they have none. Others, on the contrary, maintain that women are half divine and worship them on that account. Some sages hold that they are shallower in the brain; others that they are deeper in the consciousness. Goethe honoured them; Mussolini despises them. Wherever one looked men thought about women and thought differently. It was impossible to make head or tail of it all, I decided, glancing with envy at the reader next door who was making the neatest abstracts, headed often with an A or a B or a C, while my own notebook rioted with the wildest scribble of contradictory jottings. It was distressing, it was bewildering, it was humiliating. Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.

- Author: [Virginia Woolf](https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf.md)
- Book: [A Room of One's Own](https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf/a-room-of-ones-own.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf#A_Room_of_One's_Own_(1929)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf/a-room-of-ones-own/women-are-they

## More from this book

> The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

p. 17 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf/a-room-of-ones-own/the-beauty-of-the.md)

> For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.

p. 51 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf/a-room-of-ones-own/for-it-needs.md)

> 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.

p. 35 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf/a-room-of-ones-own/women-have-served.md)