How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
Laura Brown is trying to lose herself. No, that's not it exactly—she is trying to keep herself by gaining entry into a parallel world. She lays the book face down on her chest. Already her bedroom (no, their bedroom) feels more densely inhabited, more actual, because a character named Mrs. Dalloway is one her way to buy flowers. (3.4)
Whereas Virginia Woolf is a professional writer and Clarissa Vaughan is a professional editor and publisher, Laura Brown is an avid reader. Literature is just as much a part of her life as it is part of Virginia's and Clarissa's: on good days and bad, reading is the only thing that lets Laura feel like herself. No wonder she chooses to become a librarian after she leaves her life in Los Angeles behind.
Quote #8
He could (in the words of his own alarmed mother) have had anyone, any pageant winner, any vivacious and compliant girl, but through some obscure and possibly perverse genius had kissed, courted, and proposed to his best friend's older sister, the bookworm, the foreign-looking one with the dark, close-set eyes and the Roman nose, who had never been sought after or cherished; who had always been left alone, to read. (3.8)
Before she got married and became Laura Brown, Laura Zielski was a "solitary," "incessant reader" (3.9). Laura believes that, "[i]n another world, she might have spent her whole life reading" (3.8). When she eventually leaves her life in Los Angeles behind and moves to Toronto to become a librarian, that's exactly what she does.
Quote #9
It is only after knowing him for some time that you begin to realize you are, to him, an essentially fictional character, one he has invested with nearly limitless capacities for tragedy and comedy not because that is your true nature but because he, Richard, needs to live in a world peopled by extreme and commanding figures. Some have ended their relations with him rather than continue as figures in the epic poem he is always composing inside his head, the story of his life and passions; but others (Clarissa among them) enjoy the sense of hyperbole he brings to their lives. (4.62)
Who wouldn't love to feel as if they're a character in an epic poem being composed by one of their friends?