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Quote by Cal Newport

“As Virginia Woolf argues in her 1929 feminist manifesto, A Room of One’s Own, this imbalance should not come as a surprise. Woolf would agree that solitude is a prerequisite for original and creative thought, but she would then add that women had been systematically denied both the literal and figurative room of their own in which to cultivate this state. To Woolf, in other words, solitude is not a pleasant diversion, but instead a form of liberation from the cognitive oppression that results in its absence.”

Quote by Cal Newport

Book:Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
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Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

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Cal Newport

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“She stared out at the gloaming and didn't care that it might be the last twilight she ever saw. She cared only that she had spent too much of her twenty-six years alone, with no one at her side to share the sunsets, the starry skies, the turbulent beauty of storm clouds. She wished that she had reached out to people more, instead of retreating inward, wished that she had not made her heart into a sheltering closet. Now, when nothing mattered any more, when the insight couldn't do her any damn good at all, she realized that there was less hope of survival alone than with others. She'd been acutely aware that terror, betrayal, and cruelty had a human face, but she had not sufficiently appreciated that courage, kindness, and love had a human face as well. Hope wasn't a cottage industry; it was neither a product that she could manufacture like needlepoint samplers nor a substance that she could secrete, in her cautious solitude, like a maple tree producing the essence of syrup. Hope was to be found in other people, by reaching out, by taking risks, by opening her fortress heart.”

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“He wondered what would happen if he abandoned the spinster’s offer of marriage, if he could make the story’s denouement true to the strange, nuanced, open-ended and infinitely interesting life he was sharing now with Constance Fenimore Woolson, if he could make his adventurer begin to need, or half-need, the domestic life of a lodger with an intelligent and reserved woman who was lonely, but not willing to be preyed upon. She would ask him for nothing as obvious as marriage; what she wanted was a close and satisfying and, if necessary, unconventional attachment with loyalty and care and affection as well as solitude and distance.”

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“Writing is no more than wending a way in an attempt to restore all of the paths that had been cut-short, headed off at the pass, de-railed, even if worded byways are more dangerous than wooded paths, even if the way of writing is ill-lit, and most of all braced by the uncertainty of solitary passage.”

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Book:Buffalo Trace: A Threefold Vibration
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