For,” the outsider will say, “in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country.
She looked before she drank. Looking was part of drinking. why waste sensation, she seemed to ask, why waste a single drop that can be pressed out of this ripe, this melting, this adorable world? Then she drank. And the air round her became threaded with sensation.
Big Ben was beginning to strike, first the warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.
Yes yes yes I do like you. I am afraid to write the stronger word.
She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.
I want to raise up the magic world all round me and live strongly and quietly there.
The novel is the medium which makes it possible for people of ordinary intelligence to communicate their ideas to the world.
I dance. I ripple. I am thrown over you like a net of light. I lie quivering flung over you.
I begin to be impatient of solitude – to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me.
It is curious how, at every crisis, some phrase which does not fit insists upon coming to the rescue – the penalty of living in an old civilisation with a notebook.
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another.
Let us consider letters – how they come at breakfast, and at night, with their yellow stamps and their green stamps, immortalized by the postmark – for to see one’s own envelope on another’s table is to realize how soon deeds sever and become alien. Then at last the power of the mind to quit the body is manifest, and perhaps we fear or hate or wish annihilated this phantom of ourselves, lying on the table.
Even the names of the books gave me food for thought.
The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went.
Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions – “Will you fade? Will you perish?” – scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarcely needed that they should answer: we remain.
The proper stuff of fiction” does not exist everything is the proper stuff of fiction every feeling every thought every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon no perception comes amiss. And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her as well as honour and love her for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.
She had done the usual trick – been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst were between men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere.
If only he could be alone in his room working, he thought, among his books. That was where he felt at his ease.
To seek a true feeling among the chaos of the unfeelings or half-feelings of life, to recognize it when found, and to accept the consequences of the discovery, draws lines upon the smoothest brow, while it quickens the light of the eyes; it is a pursuit which is alternately bewildering, debasing, and exalting, and as Katherine speedily found, her discoveries gave her equal cause for surprise, shame, and intense anxiety.
When I rummage in my own mind I find no noble sentiments about being companions and equals and influencing the world to higher ends. I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in themselves.