A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf

"Do what she will a woman cannot find in them that fountain of perpetual life which the critics assure her is there. It is not only that they celebrate male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world of men; it is that the emotion with which these books are permeated is to a woman incomprehensible...
The fact is that neither Mr Galsworthy nor Mr Kipling has a spark of the woman in him. Thus all their qualities seem to a woman, if one may generalise, crude and immature. They lack suggestive power...
it is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple...It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any gievance; to plead even with justice any cause...And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilized...
Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated...There must be freedom and there must be peace."

"he no longer hums under his breath, "There has fallen a splendid tear from the passion-flower at the gate", when Pheobe crosses the beach, and she no longer replies, "My heart is like a singing bird whose nest is in a water'd shoot".