And... here's one more for tonight.
Quoting Virginia Woolf can be hard because of her stream-of-consciousness style and unconventional sentence structure. But, she's pretty much my favorite writer. In her literature she deals with so many aspects of women's lives, relationships and thought processes in such subtle ways... to me it's just amazing. In her polemical writing like A Room of One's Own,she's much more straightforward in her language, questions, etc. But, I think this is such a great passage from To the Lighthouse (1927) where a mother raised in the Victorian age is contemplating her daughters of the Edwardian age/ early 20th century during a dinner party...
"They must find a way out of it all. There might be some simpler way, some less laborious way, she sighed. When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey, her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have managed things better - her husband; money; his books. But for her own part she would never for a single second regret her decision, evade difficulties, or slur over duties. She was now formidable to behold, and it was only in silence looking up from their plates, after she had spoken so severely... [to] her daughters, Prue, Nancy, Rose - [who] could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other; for there was in their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry, of the Bank of England and the Indian Empire, of ringed fingers and lace..."