Virginia Woolf Quotes

One of the wonderful things about this glorious holiday trip I'm on is that I'm in public with people. It hasn't been inclined... I don't know - something to do with the death of my wife. It's inclined to make me isolated.

A thought Of that late death took all my heart for speech.

It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.

Survivors do not mourn together. They each mourn alone, even when in the same place. Grief is the most solitary of all feelings. Grief isolates, and every ritual, every gesture, every embrace, is a hopeless effort to break through that isolation. None of it works. The forms crumble and dissolve. To face death is to stand alone.

After my husband died, I could not write much - I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time even to contemplate writing. But I did take notes - not for fiction, but for a journal, or diary, of this terrible time. I did not think that I would ever survive this interlude.

I remember the day my mother died, and it's still hard to talk about it. I just blocked it out.

I was terribly wounded by my wife's death.

When grief is deepest, words are fewest.

When friends and lovers die and your world gets quieter; that's when the silence comes closer; that's when next isn't the least bit theoretical or abstract.

When one by one our ties are torn, and friend from friend is snatched forlorn; when man is left alone to mourn, oh! then how sweet it is to die!

When someone dies instantly, then I think the well of grief and disbelief all mixed in with it is unfathomable. And when murder is involved, that just takes it into a whole new place. There is an extra dimension you just can't compute or deal with.

My whole life sort of ended when my mom died.

After my mother's death, I had such difficulty relating to people.

Widow. The word consumes itself.

To lose a son under those circumstances - a violent death like my son went through, it just puts a burden on your heart.

When Michael died I was tipped over the edge. I was beyond grief.

Of course the death of Geoffrey has caused a lot of trauma to me generally.

The loss of my father was the most traumatic event in my life - I can't forget the pain.

If I talk about my father's funeral, as I did when I was promoting the last novel, 'Being Dead,' I'm not going to tell any lies, but there are certain things I'm not going to tell you, and I'm certainly not going to tell my grief.

My life was very tenuous last year. My daughter's death, in March in 2007, was unexpected. It was a shock. I didn't know if I'd survive it.

I've lost lots of men in my life, besides my mother, which is a whole different loss.

I was taking a nose dive somewhere between eleven and twelve because my sister had died and I was practicing something that siblings do which is follow in their footsteps and die as well.

Losing your parent is unlike anything.

To lose your last remaining parent is the toughest thing. It is a very lonely thing.

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget: but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude.