Important quotations

Important quotations

1. "For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the verriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life"

   • All classes of people can be happy
     • Richard disagrees
       • When he sees an old woman singing on the doorstep, he thinks that she is a problem that must be solved by the government
   • Her excitement and being alive
     • Galloping sentence, commas, semi-colons; happy to be alive on this June day.

2. "She had a 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."

   • Businness of life, privacy inside mind
   • Repetition
     • "out, out, far out" = incomprehensible distances, unreachable, cries for help "very, very dangerous"  = extreme danger contradicts most peoples idea, as simply living

3. "This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing."

   • Many characters cry during novel
     • Peter
       • Breaks down at Clarissa's
     • Clarissa
       • Tears come to her eyes when she thinks of her mother walking in the garden
     • Rezia
     • Septimus
       • Only character to cry openly in park, and therefore seen as mentally unstable
   • The English's "stiff upper lip"
     • Septimus considered unstable because of crying; not expected in English society. Peter scolds himself for crying afterwards for a long time

4. "Clarissa had a theory in those days . . . that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death . . . perhaps—perhaps."

   • Supported by structure of novel
     • Very little is based on what the characters do; all about their inner thoughts
   • Interconnectedness of characters
     • Many motifs, ideas and simply the way we travel through the characters' minds show how we are all connected to the furthest of people (e.g. Peter seeing Septimus' ambulance)

5. "She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble"

   • CLIMAX; narratives finally meet
     • Septimus has been reflecting Clarissa throughout novel. Clarissa started the day by plunging into the June day, and Septimus literally plunged to his death