Mrs. Dalloway

I read a lot in 2014. Not only the entire series of Song of Ice and Fire (aka Game of Thrones) but dear God just reading tons. I want to see how much I read in 2015, so each time I finish a book this year, I'll just make a post of it and put down my favorite lines from it. This is more for me than for you, but there you go.

As far as novels go, I've had better. I certainly appreciate this work in its context: it completely redefined the novel and, as the back cover says, split the atom. Instead of grand tales and epic adventures, we have a story that takes place within a single day and still finds the human experience and meaningful insights in something as simple as planning a party in 1900's London.

I am impressed with her use of interior vs. exterior and the way she shifts the scene with the reader as though we are walking along with them, panning our own camera. However, on a superficial and personal level, wasn't entirely in love. Never really connected to characters and often felt bored. Glad I read it, but may not re-visit.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

To love makes one solitary, she thought.

Here she is mending hers; mending her dress as usual, he thought; here she's been sitting all the time I've been in India; mending her dress; playing about; going to parties; running to the House and back and all that, he thought, growing more and more irritated, more and more agitated, for there's nothing in the world so bad for some women as marriage, he thought...

Everyone has friends who were killed in the War. Every one gives up something when they marry.

Those ruffians, the Gods, shan't have it all their own way,-her notion being that the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and spoiling human lives were seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved like a lady.

Once you fall... human nature is on you.

Because it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels, he thought...

...here he was, in the prime of life, walking to his house in Westminster to tell Clarissa that he loved her. Happiness is this, he thought.

And there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect

The tower of Westminster Cathedral rose in front of her, the habitation of God. In the midst of the traffic, there was the habitation of God.

Clarissa had a theory in those days- they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not again for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people.

She had often wanted to write to him, but torn it up, yet felt he understood, for people understand without things being said, as one realises growing old...

...for what can one know even of the people one lives with every day?