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.
Quote #4
Laura glances at the clock on the nightstand. It's well past seven. Why did she buy this clock, this hideous thing, with its square green face in a rectangular black Bakelite sarcophagus—how could she ever have thought it was smart? (3.4)
Laura Brown's bedside clock is a symbol of dead time—or, to put it another way, it's the symbolic representation of Laura's sense that she will be trapped forever in the life that she is leading, day after day, hour after hour, for as long as she and her husband live. It's not for nothing that she perceives the clock as something entombed in a "sarcophagus."
Quote #5
These two girls standing beside Clarissa, twenty if not younger, defiantly hefty, slouching into each other, laden with brightly colored bags from discount stores; these two girls will grow to middle and then old age, either wither or bloat; the cemeteries in which they're buried will fall eventually into ruin, the grass grown wild, browsed at night by dogs; and when all that remains of these girls is a few silver fillings lost underground the woman in the trailer, be she Meryl Streep or Vanessa Redgrave or even Susan Sarandon, will still be known. (4.9)
Lots of the novel's comments on time are reflections on mortality. Just as Willie Bass looked at fifty-two-year-old Clarissa Vaughan and saw traces of the young woman she'd been, Clarissa looks at two young women and sees the elderly women—and then the corpses—that they'll become. Cheery.
Quote #6
This neighborhood was once the center of something new and wild; something disreputable; a part of the city where the sound of guitars drifted all night out of bars and coffeehouses; where the stores that sold books and clothing smelled the way she imagined Arab bazaars must smell: incense and rich, dung-y dust, some sort of wood (cedar? camphor?), something fruitily, fertilely rotting; and where it had seemed possible, quite possible, that if you passed through the wrong door or down the wrong alley you would meet a fate […]. (4.10)
Clarissa Vaughan has lived most of her life in New York City, and she knows the city's past and present well. She can trace the passage of time through the city's streets and neighborhoods just as Willie Bass can trace it in her face.
Quote #7
"Sorry. I seem to keep thinking things have already happened. When you asked if I remembered about the party and the ceremony, I thought you meant, did I remember having gone to them. And I did remember. I seem to have fallen out of time."
"The party and ceremony are tonight. In the future."
"I understand. In a way, I understand. But, you see, I seem to have gone into the future, too. I have a distinct recollection of the party that hasn't happened yet. I remember the award ceremony perfectly." (4.71-73)
Unlike Clarissa Vaughan, who spends a fair bit of time indulging in memories of the past, Richard Brown is swept up in the future. Richard's inability to distinguish between what was, what is, and what is yet to be is one of the most striking signs of his mental deterioration—and yet, more poetically, it is also a stunning reflection of the novel's interest in human perceptions of time.
Quote #8
Richard may (although one hesitates to think in quite these terms) be entering the canon; he may at these last moments in his earthly career be receiving the first hints of a recognition that will travel far into the future […]. While there are no guarantees, it does seem possible, and perhaps even better than possible, that Clarissa and the small body of others have been right all along. […] Richard who observed so minutely and exhaustively, who tried to split the atom with words, will survive after other, more fashionable names have faded. (4.112)
Clarissa Vaughan is well aware that her friend is dying, but she can still imagine a bright future for his poetry—and for his memory. What Clarissa wants is for Richard to be recognized, here and now, in the present tense, as the sort of writer that people will be reading for years and years to come.
Quote #9
She decides, with misgivings, that she is finished for today. Always, there are these doubts. Should she try another hour? Is she being judicious, or slothful? Judicious, she tells herself, and almost believes it. She has her two hundred and fifty words, more or less. Let it be enough. Have faith that you will be here, recognizable to yourself, again tomorrow. (5.5)
Because Virginia Woolf lives in fear of relapsing into illness, it takes a lot of willpower and determination to accept that she can only work on her book little by little, day by day. Virginia doesn't have the luxury of assuming that she has all the time in the world: she has no way of knowing if and when her hours will suddenly be cut short.
Quote #10
He says, "I don't know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that."
"You don't have to go to the party. You don't have to go to the ceremony. You don't have to do anything at all."
"But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick." (18.21-23)
Title alert. For Richard Brown, each hour of the day is a trial that he struggles to endure. Unlike his friend Clarissa Vaughan, Richard doesn't believe that the dark and painful hours ahead may be broken up with hours of happiness and light; to him, the future seems absolutely bleak. His solution, in the end, is to put an end to his hours once and for all.