Virginia Woolf Quotes

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.

Is not this whole world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.

That which is cannot be true.

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

I have never yet heard of a murderer who was not afraid of a ghost.

Everything you see is not always real.

The world, life and human beings are only an illusion, a phantom, a dream image.

Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it.

Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand?

A shadow of a reflection of an image of an illusion.

Illusions... are simple facts, but they have been created by the mind, by the spirit, and they are one of the justifications of the new spatial configuration.

You, sir, are the most phantom-like of all; you are a mere dream

Devils so work that things which are not, appear to men as if they were real.

You look like a ghost," Bailey says. He can think of no better way to describe it. "You appear the same way to me, so which of us is real?

The concept, the label, is perpetually hiding from us all the nature of the real.

Truth is a necessary phantom.

Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.

I knew the past wasn't real. It was only an idea, and the thing I'd wanted to touch, to brush against, the feeling I couldn't name - it just didn't exist. It was only an idea, too.

The appearance is the allusion of abstraction when in fact I am in control of every aspect of that symmetry.

An illusion which makes me happy is worth a verity which drags me to the ground.

Reality has actually very little to do with truth; there is no necessary connection between the two.

Inside each of us resides the truth, I began, the absolute truth. But sometimes the truth is hidden in a hall of mirrors. Sometimes we believe we are viewing the real thing, when in fact we are viewing a facsimile, a distortion.

As in Rome there is, apart from the Romans, a population of statues, so apart from this real world there is a world of illusion, almost more potent, in which most men live.

A man, whilst he is dreaming, believes in his dream; he is undeceived only when he is awakened from his slumber.