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.
- Source
- A Room of One’s Own, ch. 4, 1929
- Written
- 1929
About this quotation
Woolf writes it in chapter 4, recalling the beadle who had turned her off the grass at a men’s college and barred her from its library. She imagines a young woman of 1828 telling such men that literature is open to everybody.