Tao Te Ching
Vanessa Bell
Mrs. Dalloway
One of the 20th century’s most lyrical, poetic novels; Mrs. Dalloway celebrates the inner, sacred details of everyday life. Woolf wanted to follow Thoreau’s example of describing everyday experiences, common but “burning with a hard, gem-like flame" and simple but “freeing the delicate and complicated machinery of the soul.” Mrs. Dalloway wonderfully accomplishes that purpose. On Time Magazine’s list of the 100 best modern English-language novels, it provides a memorable framework for Woolf’s anti-war sentiments, her feminism, and subjective, inner realizations. It emphasizes the greater influence of inner psychological dynamics over purely external events.
Quotes from Mrs. Dalloway
“Beauty sprang instantly… it was made out of ordinary things… that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.”
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“But to go deeper, beneath what people say—and their judgements, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!—what did it mean to her, this thing she called life?”
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“decorate the dungeon with flowers… As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate do our part; mitigate the suffering of our fellow-prisoners”
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“Did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her… somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived”
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“He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.”
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“her look, passing through all that time and that emotion, reached him doubtfully; settled on him tearfully; and rose and fluttered away, as a bird touches a branch and rise and flutters away. Quote simply she wiped her eyes.”
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“religious ecstasy made people callous as did causes; dulled their feelings”
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“Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.”
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“She had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.”
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“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.”
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“Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put their faces in front of, the actual thing… taking away the sense of the earth”
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“the power which adds the supreme floor to existence,—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it around, slowly in the light”
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“The solitary traveler is soon beyond the wood.”
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“With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes—one of the tragedies of married life.”
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