How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #10
At those times the headache moves out of her skull and into the world. Everything glows and pulses. Everything is infected with brightness, throbbing with it, and she prays for dark the way a wanderer lost in the desert prays for water. […] When she's crossed over to this realm of relentless brilliance, the voices start. Sometimes they are low, disembodied grumblings that coalesce out of the air itself; sometimes they emanate from behind the furniture or inside the walls. […] A flock of sparrows outside her window once sang, unmistakably, in Greek. (5.4)
Not only does this passage echo an earlier one in The Hours, drawing an unmistakable connection between Virginia Woolf and Richard Brown, but it also echoes Woolf's own Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia and Richard are separate mirror images of Septimus Warren Smith—a poet and WWI veteran who, in Mrs. Dalloway, suffers from undiagnosed PTSD and in the end takes his own life.