“It’s something useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life; red, blue, purple; a spirit; a splash … free from taint, dependence, soilure of humanity or care for one’s kind; something rash, ridiculous… ecstasy — it’s ecstasy that matters.”

“it being her experience that the religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes); dulled their feelings”

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

“I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”

“She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!”

“One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy.”

“There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby. ”