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About this quote

What does it mean?
Woolf describes rare mental moments where focus is absolute, allowing the imagination to escape time and space completely.
In plain terms
Sometimes the mind is so focused you can imagine escaping time and place.
What can you take from it?
Seek moments of total mental absorption.

Where it applies

  • meditation
  • creative flow
  • stress relief

Putting it to work

  • mindfulness
  • deep work
  • creative visualization

Questions to consider

  • When do you feel absorbed?
  • What do you escape to?

Another view

Such states are rare and hard to sustain in daily life.

More from Virginia Woolf

  1. Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.

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  2. I like the copious, shapeless, warm, not so very clever, but extremely easy and rather coarse aspect of things; the talk of men in clubs and public-houses; of …

    Permalink to quote #30
  3. Here on this ring of grass we have sat together, bound by the tremendous power of some inner compulsion. The trees wave, the clouds pass. The time approaches w…

    Permalink to quote #27

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