Virginia Woolf Quotes

Things seemed to go back and forth between reality and imagination--except that it was all reality.

The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.

There's a very fine line between one person's reality and another person's fantasy.

Our brains are like bonsai trees, growing around our private versions of reality.

The eye altering, alters all.

I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.

My father taught me how to substitute realities.

Art is really about perception, and mine have been changed through visiting other realities.

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

How different would our perception of reality be if... we discarded the mundane events that cannot coexist with our dreams?

Consensus reality seemed like a dull, dead-end street compared to the intense, mutable reality of visions or whatever they were - neurological misfires. I expected life to be full of sudden, inexplicable surprises. When these things didn't happen for a while, life seemed dull and painful.

In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are.

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.

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.

Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts.

We can easily represent things as we wish them to be.

It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear, but rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.

What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

The world's like a ride in a fairground & when you choose to go on it you think it's real, that's how powerful our minds are

if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones.

We say seeing is believing, but actually, we are much better at believing than at seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe all the time and occasionally seeing what we can't believe

When you sleep, your dream world is as real to you as life, isn’t it?

I do not know how to distinguish between waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?