How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
As Clarissa steps down from the vestibule her shoe makes gritty contact with the red-brown, mica-studded stone of the first stair. She is fifty-two, just fifty-two, and in almost unnaturally good health. She feels every bit as good as she did that day in Wellfleet, at the age of eighteen, stepping out through the glass doors into a day very much like this one, fresh and almost painfully clear, rampant with growth. (1.4)
Even though more than thirty years have passed since the summer when Clarissa Vaughan and Richard Brown were young, carefree lovers, Clarissa remembers those days perfectly. That summer is the most important touchstone of her life, and her memories of it are still sharp and meaningful in her middle age.
Quote #2
She waits patiently for the light. She must have been spectacular twenty-five years ago; men must have died happy in her arms. Willie Bass is proud of his ability to discern the history of a face; to understand that those who are now old were once young. The light changes and he walks on. (1.8)
Willie Bass, a random passer-by who observes Clarissa Vaughan as she waits to cross the street, believes that he can see Clarissa's whole life etched in her face. Willie reads human faces in the same way that geologists read the faces of mountains and cliffs: they reflect on the visible proofs of the passage of time.
Quote #3
She is Virginia Stephen, pale and tall, startling as a Rembrandt or a Velázquez, appearing twenty years ago at her brother's rooms in Cambridge in a white dress, and she is Virginia Woolf, standing before him right now. She has aged dramatically, just this year, as if a layer of air has leaked out from under her skin. She's grown craggy and worn. She's begun to look as if she's carved from very porous, gray-white marble. She is still regal, still exquisitely formed, still possessed of her former lunar radiance, but she is suddenly no longer beautiful. (2.26)
Like Clarissa Vaughan, Virginia Woolf gets a literary time-lapse treatment as she stands under the gaze of a watchful man. In this case, the watchful man is her husband, Leonard, who can still see the woman she was twenty years ago as he looks at the woman she is now.