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For women live much more in the past...they attach themselves to places.
Sep 29, 2025
The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?
It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.
Fear no more, says the heart.
Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.
...she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.
What does the brain matter compared with the heart?
After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.
He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.
Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day
Still, life had a way of adding day to day
The Hours is in fact a lovely triumph. Cunningham honors both Mrs. Dalloway and its creator with unerring sensitivity, thanks to his modesty of intention and his sovereignly affecting prose.... With his elliptical evocation of Mrs. Dalloway, he has managed to pay great but quiet tribute -- reminding us of the gorgeous, ferocious beauty of what endures.
The compensation of growing old ... was simply this; that the passion remains as strong as ever, but one has gained -- at last! -- the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence -- the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.
Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.
Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?
She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.
Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall
Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are.
But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.
At Princeton I wrote my junior paper on Virginia Woolf, and for my senior thesis I wrote on Samuel Beckett. I wrote some about "Between the Acts" and "Mrs. Dalloway'' but mostly about "To the Lighthouse." With Beckett I focused, perversely, on his novels, "Molloy," "Malone Dies," and "The Unnamable." That's when I decided I should never write again.
She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.
Whether it's Mrs Dalloway's lost love or Thérèse Raquin's burgeoning horror, The Paying Guests reminds us of every great novel we've gasped or winced at, or loudly urged the protagonists through, and it does not relent. . . . The Paying Guests is the apotheosis of [Waters'] talent; at least for now. I have tried and failed to find a single negative thing to say about it. Her next will probably be even better. Until then, read it, Flaubert, Zola, and weep.
As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
She belonged to a different age, but being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable --- this interminable life.
Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.
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