"But if sleep it was, of what nature, can we scarcely refrain from asking, are sleeps such as these? Are they remedial measures-- trances in which the most galling memories, events that seem likely to cripple life for ever, are brushed with a dark wing which rubs their harshness off and gilds them, even the ugliest and basest, with a lustre, an incandescence? Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?" -Virginia Woolf, Orlando

"If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where... is truth?" -Virginia Woolf

One's personality seems to echo out across space, when he's not there to enclose all one's vibrations. This is not very intelligibly written; but the feeling itself is a strange one--as if marriage were a completing of the instrument, and the sound of one alone penetrates as it if were a violin robbed of its orchestra or piano.
-Virginia Woolf, Diary, Friday 2 November 1917
A Moment's Liberty: The Shorter Diary of Virginina Woolf. Anne Olivier Bell, Ed.