How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
It isn't failure, she tells herself. It isn't failure to be in these rooms, in your skin, cutting the stems of flowers. It isn't failure but it requires more of you, the whole effort does; just being present and grateful; being happy (terrible word). People don't look at you on the street anymore, or if they do it is not with sexual notions of any sort. You are not invited to lunch by Oliver St. Ives. (8.25)
It bums Clarissa Vaughan out to think that people no longer think of her as a sexual—and sexually attractive—being. She knows that other things in life are more important than the admiration of total strangers, but still—she'd prefer if people didn't think of her as having aged out of sex and sexuality.
Quote #5
It was not betrayal, she had insisted; it was simply an expansion of the possible. She did not require fidelity of Richard—god forbid!—and she was not in any way extorting property that belonged to Louis. […] It was 1965; love spent might simply engender more of the same. It seemed possible, at least. Why not have sex with everybody, as long as you wanted them and they wanted you? So Richard continued on with Louis and started up with her as well, and it felt right; simply right. (8.27)
Clarissa Vaughan grew up in the fabled era of free love, and she and her friends made the most of it. The results are more complicated than they thought, though—as we can see by the characters' continued confusion about what they want.
Quote #6
It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers; and even the sex, once she and Richard reached that point, was ardent but awkward, unsatisfying, more kindly than passionate. 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. (8.31)
It isn't so much the memory of sex itself that Clarissa Vaughan values now, in her middle age: what she values is the whole sexual atmosphere of the time. The certainty of being young, beautiful, and wanted; the thrill of being swept up in sensations of promise and possibility: these are the things she values and misses most.