Skip to content

Dreams Quotes by Virginia Woolf

39 Dreams quotes by Virginia Woolf

All Dreams quotes Virginia Woolf’s page

Sirens lolloping on the green sea illustrate how dreams can feel like bright, strange music to a lone traveler. The quotes show that dreams can be both playful, like a silly unhappy dream, and deep, like a night stretched fuller with visions. They also remind us that life can feel like a dream, and waking can feel harsh.

Rate this collection: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

“Oh, to awake from dreaming!”

Image

I have had my vision.

Image

It doesn't have to be the truth, just your vision of it, written down.

Image

It was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy.

Image

I will dream today; for I must unscrew my head somehow.

Image

Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.

Image

He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

Image

it is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams

Image

“I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.”

Image

He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.

Image

“It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface.”

Image

By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our…

Image

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Image

“I have a perfectly romantic and no doubt untrue vision of you in my mind – stamping out the hops in a…

Image

The weight of the world is on our shoulders, its vision is through our eyes; if we blink or look aside, or…

Image

“For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand…

Image

“Such are the visions which proffer great cornucopias full of fruit to the solitary traveller, or murmur in his ear like sirens…

Image

“The looking-glass vision is of suprme importance because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervous system. Take it away and man…

Image

Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and…

Image

“Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies…

Image

His eyes were bright, and, indeed, he scarcely knew whether they held dreams or realities...and in five minutes she had filled the…

Image

“I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir…

Image

Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before…

Image

“Even his sleep was full of dreams. He dreamt as he had not dreamt since the old days at Three Mile Cross…

Image

“As summer neared, as the evening lengthened there came to the wakeful, the hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool, imaginations of…

Image

The roar of the traffic, the passage of undifferentiated faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the features…

Image

“When the white arm rests upon the knee it is a triangle; now it is upright - a column; now a fountain,…

Image

“Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before…

Image

There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this…

Image

“But she could not reduce her vision to words, since it was no single shape coloured upon the dark, but rather a…

Image

Every season is likeable, and wet days and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even sleep, that deplorable curtailment of…

Image

“Why, from the very windows, even in the dusk, you see a swelling run through the street, an aspiration, as with arms…

Image

“That dream, of sharing, completing, of finding in solitude on the beach an answer, was then but a reflection in a mirror,…

Image

...so now, Mrs. Ramsay thought, she could return to that dream land, that unreal but fascinating place, the Manning's drawing-room at Marlow…

Image

“Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put their faces in front of, the actual thing; often overpowering the…

Image

Rhoda comes now, having slipped in while we were not looking. She must have made a tortuous course, taking cover now behind…

Image

“There it lay in the early sunshine of spring. It looked a town rather than a house, but a town built, not…

Image

“Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour…

Image

“Hail, happiness, then, and after happiness, hail not those dreams which bloat the sharp image as spotted mirrors do the face in…

Image

Other authors on Dreams

More by Virginia Woolf

Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.

“The train slows and lengthens, as we approach London, the centre, and my heart draws out too, in fear, in exaltation. I am about…

“Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword. On one side all is correct, definite, orderly; the paths…

“Other worshipful objects were content with worship; men, women, God, all let one kneel prostrate; but this form, were it only the shape of…

Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.

“Sometimes he woke with a brain like lead; at others it was as if a thousand wax tapers were alight and people were throwing…

The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life -…

A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.

Love ought to stop on both sides, don’t you think, simultaneously?’ He spoke without any stress on the words, so as not to wake…

“It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to talk. To follow the…

“What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! (...) I think I could happily live here & read forever.”

“what a luxury to be alone once more,”

“...a woman writing thinks back through her mothers.”

“For one's children so often gave one's own perceptions a little thrust forwards.”

“She would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same…