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If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless, though: only th...more

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I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said.But he never liked anyone who--our friends,' said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue...more

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Septimus has been working too hard" - that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought.

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This susceptibility to impressions had been his undoing, no doubt. Still at his age he had, like a boy or a girl even, these alternations of mood; goo...more

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But we-' she glanced at him as if to ascertain his position, 'we see each other only now and then-''Like lights in a storm-''In the midst of a hurrica...more

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Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.

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Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.

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

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Talk of solitude (...). It is the last resort of the civilised: our souls are so creased and soured in meaning we can only unfold them when we are alo...more

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I begin to be impatient of solitude - to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me.

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But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.

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But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of...more

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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. ...more

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I must be able to say, 'Percival, a ridiculous name'. At the same time let me tell you, men and women, hurrying to the tube station, you would have ha...more

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I want someone to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling...more