I’ll be blasted’, he said, ’if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I’ll write, from this day forward, to please myself.
Such are the visions which proffer great cornucopias full of fruit to the solitary traveller, or murmur in his ear like sirens lolloping away on the green sea waves, or are dashed in his face like bunches of roses, or rise to the surface like pale faces which fishermen flounder through floods to embrace.
As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on the mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand.
The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don’t belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional.
For,” the outsider will say, “in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country.
Pale, with dark hair, the one who is coming is melancholy, romantic. And I am arch and fluent and capricious; for he is melancholy, he is romantic. He is here.
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.