How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
Concerts and plays swept past them, money had been spent and renewed, reputations won and lost, and the city herself, emblematic of their lives, rose and fell in a continual flux, while her shallows washed more widely against the hills of Surrey and over the fields of Hertfordshire. This famous building had arisen, that was doomed. Today Whitehall had been transformed: it would be the turn of Regent Street tomorrow. And month by month the roads smelt more strongly of petrol, and were more difficult to cross, and human beings heard each other speak with greater difficulty, breathed less of the air, and saw less of the sky. Nature withdrew: the leaves were falling by midsummer; the sun shone through dirt with an admired obscurity. (13.1)
If we're to believe the narrator, urbanization is a terrible thing; the city, though inevitable in its spread and transformation, is a negative force here that divorces humanity from Nature and everything natural with its constant, inhuman evolution.
Quote #5
The feudal ownership of land did bring dignity, whereas the modern ownership of movables is reducing us again to a nomadic horde. We are reverting to the civilization of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty. (17.2)
Here we find another comment on the ills of modern life, this time on the contemporary tendency to move around, rather than settling into a place forever. The narrator attempts to link the dullness of middle-class life with its lack of real connection to the places and things that furnish these lives.
Quote #6
"I hate this continual flux of London. It is an epitome of us at our worst--eternal formlessness; all the qualities, good, bad, and indifferent, streaming away--streaming, streaming for ever. That's why I dread it so. I mistrust rivers, even in scenery. Now, the sea--" (20.13)
Margaret is stressed out by the changing face of the city; she doesn't understand why mankind always has to demand change of itself. The metaphor of the sea, left unfinished, creates a different model – one in which the tide goes away but always returns.