It is pretty fair to say that Virginia Woolf had a way with words like no other. Here’s a compilation of some of Virginia’s most famous quotes from her many books, letters and diaries.

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1929

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” – Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, 1938

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1929

“I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it.” – Virginia Woolf, Letter to Lady Robert Cecil, November 12 1922

“Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.” – Virginia Woolf, Diary, May 13 1926

“Indeed, I would venture to guess that anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1929

“Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” – Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931

“I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. She died young–alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.” – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1929

“Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.” – Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.” – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1929

“I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.” – Virginia Woolf, Diary, 17 February 1922

“Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death – Percival – others through sheer inability to cross the street.” – Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931

“Neither of us knows what the public will think. There’s no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at forty) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.” – Virginia Woolf, Diary, 26 July, 1922

“Disastrous would have been the result if a fire or a death had suddenly demanded something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the hungry hours.” – Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, 1915

“Thoughts are divine.” – Virginia Woolf, Orlando, 1928

“Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.” – Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 1922

“Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?” – Virginia Woolf, The Years, 1937

“Well, I really don’t advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married.” – Virginia Woolf, Night and Day, 1919

“Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?” – Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 1925

“There it was before her – life. Life: she thought but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance.” – Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 1927

“Books are the mirrors of the soul.” – Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, 1941

“I will not be ‘famous,’ ‘great.’ I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.”- Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary