Virginia Woolf Quotes From Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf quotes are hard to cut out cleanly, because her sentences turn in the middle: a semicolon, a “but”, a parenthesis, and the thought has gone somewhere else. These fourteen lines from Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) survive being lifted out, and each comes with the part of the novel it belongs to and what is happening around it.

Neither novel has numbered chapters in the usual sense. Mrs Dalloway runs as one unbroken day with occasional section breaks, so its quotes are placed by scene. To the Lighthouse is in three parts, “The Window”, “Time Passes” and “The Lighthouse”, each divided into numbered sections, and those numbers are given below.

Virginia Woolf quotes from Mrs Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

Advertisement

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), opening line

A first sentence in reported speech, about an errand. Woolf starts not with Clarissa but with something Clarissa said, already slightly at a distance, and the next sentence explains that the maid, Lucy, has her work cut out for her. It is a party novel, and it begins with the logistics.

There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa’s morning walk

Big Ben striking as Clarissa crosses Victoria Street. “The leaden circles dissolved in the air” comes back at the end of the novel, when she hears the clock again at her party, so the phrase works like a bell itself, marking time across the whole day.

She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa at the Park gates

Clarissa watching taxis in Piccadilly. Each sentence holds two states at once and refuses to choose, which is the most accurate description of Woolf’s own method you will find anywhere in her fiction.

She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Bond Street

Walking up Bond Street, Clarissa feels herself become “Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more”, as the sentence goes on to say. The three words separated by semicolons do the work: each one is a little further from being seen.

Men must not cut down trees. There is a God. (He noted such revelations on the backs of envelopes.) Change the world. No one kills from hatred.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus in Regent’s Park

Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran, on a park bench while his wife Rezia watches him. The revelations are spaced like a list of commandments, and the parenthesis that interrupts them is the saddest thing in the book: a man writing down messages from the universe on scraps of post.

Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, the party

At her party, Clarissa hears from Lady Bradshaw that a young man has killed himself. She has never met Septimus, and alone in a small room she thinks her way into his death. It is the moment the novel’s two halves touch, and they touch only in her head.

What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, closing lines

Peter Walsh, whom Clarissa refused to marry when they were young, sees Clarissa come back into the room. “For there she was” is as plain as English gets, and after a novel spent inside heads it simply puts her in front of us. More on this ending in our close reading of Mrs Dalloway.

From To the Lighthouse

“Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,” said Mrs. Ramsay. “But you’ll have to be up with the lark,” she added.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927), “The Window”, section 1

The novel opens on a “yes” to six-year-old James, who wants to sail to the lighthouse. His father immediately says it will not be fine. The trip does not happen in this part of the book, and when it finally does, in part three, Mrs Ramsay is dead.

He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, “The Window”, section 6

Mr Ramsay, a philosopher, pictures thought as an alphabet and himself as stuck one letter short of R. It is the funniest passage Woolf wrote and a precise portrait of academic vanity and dread, and it is delivered from inside his own head, so he is the one keeping score.

To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, “The Window”, section 11

Mrs Ramsay, knitting after the children have gone to bed. The woman everyone in the novel depends on finds her freedom in becoming dark and small. Set it beside Clarissa’s “invisible; unseen; unknown” and you can see the same idea in two moods.

[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, “Time Passes”, section 3

The most famous square brackets in modern fiction. The central character of the whole first part dies inside a parenthesis, in a subordinate clause, while the main text of “Time Passes” is busy with wind and damp in the empty house.

Women can’t paint, women can’t write …

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, “The Window”, section 9

Charles Tansley’s sneer, which Lily Briscoe cannot get out of her ear while she works on her painting. Woolf has Lily hear it as “whispering”, a voice in the head rather than a speech. Lily is one of the painters on our list of novels about painters.

What is the meaning of life? That was all–a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, “The Lighthouse”, section 4

Lily, ten years later, back at the house. It is the closest Woolf comes to a statement of belief, and she gives it to a woman holding a paintbrush and thinking about Mrs Ramsay’s “Life stand still here”, which follows a few lines on.

It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, “The Lighthouse”, final section

The last line. Lily judges that Mr Ramsay’s boat must have reached the lighthouse, and draws a single line down the centre of her canvas. The novel’s first word was “Yes” from Mrs Ramsay; here the “Yes” belongs to Lily.

Quick reference

Reading the full texts

Mrs Dalloway is on Project Gutenberg, transcribed from the 1925 Harcourt edition published in New York. To the Lighthouse is not on the US Gutenberg site; the full text is at Project Gutenberg Australia, which prints Woolf’s italics in capital letters, so do not be alarmed by sudden shouting. The first edition came out in 1927 from the Hogarth Press, the publishing house Leonard and Virginia Woolf ran themselves, as the title page in the University of Otago’s special collections shows.

For more of the sea that surrounds the Ramsays’ house, see our book quotes about the sea.

Sources

• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Harcourt, 1925), Project Gutenberg #71865
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927), Project Gutenberg Australia eBook 0100101
• University of Otago, OUR Heritage, To the Lighthouse, 1st edition (Hogarth Press, 1927)