“The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude.”

“The happiest folk are those that are busy, for their minds are starved of time to seek out woe.”

“This perpetual hurry of business and company ruins me in soul if not in body. More solitude and earlier hours!”

“Violent passions are formed in solitude. In the busy world no object has time to make a deep impression.”

“In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.”

“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.”