“That’s my mother,” thought Prue. … That is the thing itself.

—Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases. But what she wished to get hold of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything.

—Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about … the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

—Woolf, Moments of Being