How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"Isn't it beautiful?" Mrs. Dalloway said that morning to Richard. He answered, "Beauty is a whore, I like money better." He preferred wit. Clarissa, being the youngest, the only woman, felt she could afford a certain sentimentality. If it was late June, she and Richard would have been lovers. It would have been almost a full month since Richard left Louis's bed (Louis the farm-boy fantasy, the living embodiment of lazy-eyed carnality) and came into hers. (1.4)
Clarissa Vaughan and Richard Brown have a sexual history, but all that's left of that era of their lives are the memories that Clarissa lets herself indulge in every once in a while.
Quote #2
There she is, thinks Willie Bass, who passes her some mornings just about here. The old beauty, the old hippie, hair still long and defiantly gray, out on her morning rounds in jeans and a man's cotton shirt, some sort of ethnic slippers (India? Central America?) on her feet. She still has a certain sexiness; a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm […]. She must have been spectacular twenty-five years ago; men must have died happy in her arms. (1.8)
Speaking of Clarissa Vaughan's youthful sexiness and sexual expression, it seems that she still carries the traces of her younger, sexually liberated self. It might even make Clarissa happy to know that Willie Bass thinks of her in these terms, as she suspects that no one notices her anymore or thinks of her "with sexual notions of any sort" (8.25) now that she's middle-aged.
Quote #3
Clarissa Dalloway, in her first youth, will love another girl, Virginia thinks; Clarissa will believe that a rich, riotous future is opening before her, but eventually (how, exactly, will the change be accomplished?) she will come to her senses, as young women do, and marry a suitable man.
Yes, she will come to her senses, and marry. (7.1-2)
Do we detect a twinge of personal regret in these thoughts? Does Virginia Woolf wish that she herself had not done the "sensible" thing, and married a man?
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.
Quote #7
Kitty snakes her arms around Laura's waist. Laura is flooded with feeling. Here, right here in her arms, are Kitty's fear and courage, Kitty's illness. Here are her breasts. Here is the stout, practical heart that beats beneath; here are the watery lights of her being—deep pink lights, red-gold lights, glittering, unsteady; lights that gather and disperse; here are the depths of Kitty, the heart beneath the heart; the untouchable essence that a man (Ray, of all people!) dreams of, yearns toward, searches for so desperately at night. (9.72)
Laura Brown shares an unexpected and intimate moment with her neighbor, Kitty, but the two women play it off like nothing happened. What do you think, Shmoopers? Could some feelings of repressed or unfulfilled sexuality be contributing to Laura's depression?
Quote #8
"Well," Clarissa says. She can think of nothing else to say. She feels sorry for Louis, and deeply impatient, and yet, she thinks, Louis is in love. He is in love with a young man. He is fifty-three and still has all that ahead of him, the sex and the ridiculous arguments, the anguish. (11.106)
Although Clarissa Vaughan is annoyed to hear that her friend Louis Waters has fallen in love with yet another one of his drama students, she's a little bit jealous of him, too. After all, she's been feeling like her days of sexual adventure are far behind her, and here's Louis, a year older than she is, climbing back into the saddle for more.
Quote #9
She touches her lips, where Kitty's kiss briefly resided. She doesn't mind so much about the kiss, what it does and does not imply, except that it gives Kitty an edge. Love is deep, a mystery—who wants to understand its every particular? Laura desires Kitty. She desires her force, her brisk and cheerful disappointment, the shifting pink-gold lights of her secret self and the crisp, shampooed depths of her hair. Laura desires Dan, too, in a darker and less exquisite way; a way that is more subtly haunted by cruelty and shame. Still it is desire; sharp as a bone chip. (12.6)
All things considered, Laura Brown seems to be very comfortable with the sudden realization that she desires her neighbor, Kitty. Since we don't learn anything about her sexual history, we have no way of knowing if that unexpected kiss in the kitchen was a moment of epiphany for Laura. Maybe she already knew that she was attracted to women; maybe she didn't. One thing's for sure: Michael Cunningham makes a point of avoiding any of the tropes that depict bisexual people as tormented and confused.
Quote #10
They are just beginning to open. Their petals, at the base, are suffused with a deeper yellow, almost orange, a mango-colored blush that spreads upward and diffuses itself in hairline veins. […] Sally buys them quickly, almost furtively, as if she fears the Korean woman who runs the stand will realize there's been a mix-up and inform her, gravely, that these flowers are not for sale. She walks along Tenth Street with the roses in her hand, feeling exultant, and when she enters the apartment she is slightly aroused. How long has it been since they've had sex? (16.81)
Fortunately for Clarissa Vaughan, her sexy days aren't over yet. Just because the average person on the street may not think of her "with sexual notions" (8.25), that doesn't mean that her partner, Sally, is oblivious to her charms.