Virginia Woolf Quotes

You know what I mean? Real and unreal, beautiful and strange, like a dream. It got me high as a kite, but it didn’t last long enough. It ended too soon and left nothing behind.” That’s how it is with dreams,” said Priscilla. “They’re the perfect crime.

Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.

What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.

For all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.

We build statues out of snow, and weep to see them melt.

I am a temporary amusement.

The whole basketball world, it's a fantasy and it's short-lived.

Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world: As star at dawn, a bubble in a stream A flash of lightning in a summer cloud A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream

I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die.

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

Life and death are nothing but the mind. Years, months, days, and hours are nothing but the mind. Dreams, illusions, and mirages are nothing but the mind. The bubbles of water and the flames of fire are nothing but the mind. The flowers of the spring and the moon of the autumn are nothing but the mind. Confusions and dangers are nothing but the mind.

Fond man! the vision of a moment made! Dream of a dream! and shadow of a shade!

One should see that all appearance is like mist and fog.

Our treasures trifles seem, and all our life is dreaming, and the dreams themselves are dreams.

For this I see, that we, all we that live, Are but vain shadows, unsubstantial dreams.

These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade.

The most solid pleasure in this life is the empty pleasure of illusion.

I felt like a rich vagabond who had passed through the world paving my way with gold fairy dust, then realizing too late that the path disintegrated as soon as I passed over it.

Even the most solid of things, and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only hand shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light.

I played with the image, because I think image is temporary. It's a projection. It's illusory.

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.

Everything transitory is but an image.

That’s the great illusion of travel, of course, the notion that there’s somewhere to get to. A place where you can finally say, Ah, I’ve arrived. (Of course there is no such place. There’s only a succession of waitings until you go home.)