How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
Here is the brilliant spirit, the woman of sorrows, the woman of transcendent joys, who would rather be elsewhere, who has consented to perform simple and essentially foolish tasks, to examine tomatoes, to sit under a hair dryer, because it is her art and her duty. Because the war is over, the world has survived, and we are here, all of us, making homes, having and raising children, creating not just books or paintings but a whole world—a world of order and harmony where children are safe (if not happy), where men who have seen horrors beyond imagining, who have acted bravely and well, come home to lighted windows, to perfume, to plates, to napkins. (3.14)
For her part, Laura Brown sometimes feels that all of the little things that she does daily to show her love for her husband and son are just part of one big show—a show that many American women are putting on simply because it seems like the right thing to do.
Quote #8
What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other. (8.31)
This one perfect moment from Clarissa Vaughan's youth resembles the moment that Virginia Woolf imagines for her heroine, Mrs. Dalloway—a single kiss, the memory of which will last a lifetime. For Clarissa, none of this discounts the genuine love that she feels for her long-term partner, Sally, but this "singular perfection" does stand out from every other moment in her life.
Quote #9
He says, "I don't know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that."
"You don't have to go to the party. You don't have to go to the ceremony. You don't have to do anything at all."
"But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick." (18.21-23)
Like Virginia Woolf, Richard Brown isn't willing to continue living on in misery just for the sake of his loved ones. Clarissa Vaughan has suspected that Richard doesn't love the world like she does, and, in the end, her suspicions turn out to be right.