“The spring without a leaf to toss, bare and bright like a virgin fierce in her chastity, scornful in her purity, was laid out on fields wide-eyed and watchful and entirely careless of what was done or thought by the beholders.”

“What is more irritating than to see one’s subject, on whom one has lavished so much time and trouble, slipping out of one’s grasp altogether and indulging — witness her sighs and gasps, her flushing, her palings, her eyes now bright as lamps, now haggard as dawns— what is more humiliating than to see all this dumb show of emotion and excitement gone through before our eyes when we know that what causes it — thought and imagination — are of no importance whatsoever?”

“With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets—what nonsense was he thinking? She was fifty at least: she had eight children. Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen: with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair—He took her bag.”

“The strange thing on looking back was the purity, the integrity of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one's feeling for a man.”

“She saw the light again. With some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all, one's relations changed, she looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the floor), but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known 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!”

“Orlando was unaccountably disappointed. She had thought ofliterature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must beher excuse) as something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift aslightning; something errant, incalculable, abrupt, and behold,literature was an elderly gentleman in a grey suit talking aboutduchesses.”

“There is something I want-something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper without knowing quite what it was, with her eyes closed.”