Status Updates From To the Lighthouse (Signatur...

I’m really enjoying the conflict of Mrs Ramsay’s character, especially through the eyes of different people. Although, this book seems to spam metaphors every two sentences of something so little

for she could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveler, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman and work in the fields, again.

The physical sensations that went with the bare look of the steps had become suddenly extremely unpleasant. To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain.

she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. "about life, about death; about Mrs. Ramsay" - no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.

it was to be a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses.

beauty had this penalty - it came to readily, came to completely. It stilled life- froze it.

No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing.

His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at her feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet.

But what a power was in the human soul! that women sitting there writing under the rock resolved everything into simplicity

but this morning everything seemed so extraordinarily queer that a question like nancy's - what does one send to the lighthouse?- opened doors in ones mind that went banging and swinging to and fro and made one keep asking in a stupefied gape, What does one send? What does one do? Why is one sitting here, after all?

do say something, she thought, wishing only to hear his voice. for the shadow, the thing folding them in was beginning, she felt, to close round her again.


was there no crumb on his coat? nothing she could do for him?

loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom

they would, she thought, going on again, however long they lived, come back to this night; this moon; this wind; this house: and to her too. It flattered her, where she was most susceptible to flattery, to think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven; and this, and this, and this, she thought !!!!!!!!

these lovers, these people entering into illusion glittering eyed, must be danced around with mockery, decorated with garlands.

she need not marry, thank Heaven: she need not undergo that degradation. She was saved from that dilution. she would move the tree rather more to the middle.

of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.

she had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything [...] as if there was an eddy-there- and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it. its all come to an end

everything about him had that meagre fixity, that bare unloveliness. but nevertheless, the fact remained, it was almost impossible to dislike any one if one looked at them

she became with all that power sweeping savagely and and inevitably withdrawing, hypnotized, and the two senses of that vastness and this tininess flowering within it made her feel that she was bound hand and foot and unable to move by the intensity of feelings which reduced her own body, her own life, and the lives of all the people in the world, for ever, to nothingness

nettled in their cots like birds among cherries and raspberries, still making up stories about some little bit of rubbish - something they had heard, something they had picked up in the garden they had all their little treasures...

not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience

in the failing light they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances.

what device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored?

could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay's knee

it was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become peart of the human gain. so it was indeed. the world by all means should have shared it

She felt herself transfixed by the intensity of her perception

how life from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived by and one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach

nieuw semester, nieuwe reading list (nummer 1 van de 14 🫣)

"Strife, divisions, difference of opinion, prejudices twisted into the very fibre of being, oh that they should begin so early, Mrs Ramsay deplored. They were so critical, her children. They talked such nonsense. It seemed to her such nonsense - inventing difference, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that"