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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

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.

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