“But what still remains with me as a worse infliction than either was the poison of fear and bitterness which those days bred in me.”
“To begin with, always to be doing work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave, flattering and fawning, not always necessarily perhaps, but it seemed necessary and the stakes were too great to run risks; and then the thought of that one gift which it was death to hide–a small one but dear to the possessor–perishing and with it my self, my soul–all this became like a rust eating away the bloom of the spring, destroying the tree at its heart.”
“Literature is open to anybody….Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
–Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own