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?