Virginia Woolf Quotes About Solitude

Quotes about: Solitude

• How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.

  Virginia Woolf

  Coffee, Sea, Knives

  Virginia Woolf (2005). “The Waves”, p.253, Collector's Library

• . . . clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.

  Virginia Woolf

  Solitude, Clumsiness

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.407, Wordsworth Editions

• In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.

  Virginia Woolf

  Life, Memories, Giving

• For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone.

  Virginia Woolf

  Thinking, Solitude, Needs

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “To the Lighthouse”, p.58, Tyché

• For pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space ; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects ; and sounds very remote and then very close ; flesh being gashed and blood sparting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.” — Virginia Woolf, The Waves

  Virginia Woolf

  Pain, Virginia, Blood

  Virginia Woolf (2005). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.763, Wordsworth Editions

• Every season is likeable, and wet days and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life, can be full of dreams; and the most common actions──a walk, a talk, solitude in one’s own orchard──can be enhanced and lit up by the association of the mind. Beauty is everywhere, and beauty is only two finger’s-breadth from goodness.

  Virginia Woolf

  Dream, Wine, Sleep

  "The Common Reader". Book by Virginia Woolf, 1925.

• But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.

  Virginia Woolf

  Solitude, Undoing

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1411, Delphi Classics

• I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.

  Virginia Woolf

  Giving, Solitude, Want

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.38, Virginia Woolf

• So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Sea, Solitude

  Virginia Woolf (1981). “Mrs. Dalloway”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

• Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going.

  Virginia Woolf

  Party, Virginia, Two

• ...solitary like a pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train window, vanishing so quickly that the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though once seen. *** Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again.

  Virginia Woolf

  Morning, Solitude, Looks

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