For the next few days, I am going to be posting about some of my favorite books. To get things rolling, I decided to begin with a few passages from my very favorite, Mrs. Dalloway. Ive decided not to wax on about its brilliance, as I've done so before, but I also couldn't imagine compiling favorites and not letting Clarissa have her moment. The doodle above is one of my most prized editions (I have too many to count). Sticking out from the side are two bits of paper, one a copy of a poem from the Antioch Review, and the other a copy of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est." I stuck them in the pages the very first time I read this copy, which was actually the very first time I read the novel, and they feel as much a part of the book as Woolf's own writing.
For now, here are a few of my favorite bits from this lovely novel:
"For he would say it in so many words when he came into the room. Because it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels."
"It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not "here, here, and here"; and she tapped the edge of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people that completed them; even the places. Odd affinities with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind the counter - even trees or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her skepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary when 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."
2 comments:
I have this edition! It was one of the few books on our comps list that I actually read.
love.
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