“So that was the end of that marriage.”

“So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball”

“She was married, true; but if one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts.”

“For in marriage a little licence,a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him.”

“I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer? ”

“... a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.”

“It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it, and offer, quite out of my own habit, to look for a brooch on a beach; also it is the stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions, and turns a nice young man with a profile like a gem’s (Paul’s was exquisite) into a bully with a crowbar (he was swaggering, he was insolent) in the Mile End Road.”