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Rather than provoking lust, it was a body that made one want to rest ones gaze quietly upon it.

you believed that if you could somehow hold them firmly and tightly enough you could stop anything happening to them, physically hold the world still and whole for them against disaster.

Recendy, though, she'd found herself taking pleasure in how genuinely distracted and disorganised he was: it made her imagine a life so different to her life with the children, where thought had to be fitted into little discrete spaces inside her routine. She imagined the slow ripening of Tony's ideas in a rich vegetable chaos, uninterrupted by the petty necessities of mealtimes and housework.

What if she was doing this not, as she had believed, out of deep inner need, but in fact because she was following a pattern, a seductive and flattering and false suggestion that flowed at her on all sides from novels and films and advertising, about the importance, the paramount and endless intricate intriguing importance, of her own fulfilment?

What if she was leaving a good man and breaking up a family, not even for love, but just for curiosity, out of dissatisfaction?

There was just the sense of want in her like a tiger, a great rapacious cat; want not need; want like a reflex, the strong tension of slack muscles collecting themselves to spring: unmoralised. And she rejoiced in this rapacious cat in herself, shamelessly, as if might was right.

This wasn't what she'd meant to say, and wasn't even strictly true - after lunch she'd fallen asleep in the armchair, then she'd sat down and watched television peaceably with the children for an hour in the afternoon. She had meant to commiserate with Bram; often this happened, that the kind thing she'd meant to say turned in his actual presence into an unstoppable spurt of protest, grey and shaming.

Partly, it was precisely the singleness of Helly's life that Clare most envied. […] The idea of such empty acres of solitude was a cooling balm against the promiscuous itch of Clare and Bram's crowded little house where every surface was greasy with touching and there was no lock on the toilet door and at night the children wandered from bed to bed.

She imagined a morning for Helly, a parallel place in the world where Helly moved with lightness between free choices, taking a long shower, picking out clothes from her wardrobe, drinking filter coffee, eating a croissant and then a peach from a shallow ceramic fruit bowl on a glass table, looking over a script for a rehearsal she was going to in the afternoon.

Bram got up and went to work. Since then Clare had made breakfast for the children, washed up the dishes, got them all dressed, tidied the beds. She had sorted out a wash for the machine, and hung it out when it was finished on one of the two drooping wooden clothes horses she had to use to dry the clothes in a corner of the kitchen when it wasn't fine enough to hang them outdoors.

Marian's older daughter Clare was supposed to help too, but she had young children and moods and didn't regularly manage it; she was in that baffled, lean, wolfish phase of young motherhood Marian dimly remembered, when you feel you may have been cheated of too many pleasures in exchange for the burden of loved children you can't unwish.

It was impossible to imagine her in the midst of all the palaver of Clare's generation, beanbags and water births, bonding and demand feeding; impossible to imagine hers as one of those middle-class households thrown into a kind of slack excruciated martyrdom for years on end by sleep problems and the crisis of belief in adult authority.

Finished Mrs Dalloway. I have mixed feelings about this one.

This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing.

People who don't read often imagine that a life lived with books is serenely truthful, perhaps rather idealistic, elevated to a higher sphere above the trickeries and treacheries of real life. Combined with the children, and the little house without television, and the making of her own bread and the salting of lemons, the books may make him think she is wholesome and sane.

Bravest thing about people, Miss Joan, is how they go on loving mortal beings after finding out there's such a thing as dying.

Perhaps she would never write again. She would have that life that she supposed other women have: shopping, cooking, arranging dinner parties, meeting friends for lunch. All those worldly acquaintances who had been so kind with their invitations to little gatherings and whom she had hitherto repaid only with a desire that they should see her garden.

I am no longer young, she thought; this is my last chance. Penelope is right. It is high time I forgot my hopes, the hopes I was born with, and faced reality. I shall never have that for which I long with my inmost heart. How could I? It is too late. But there are all the comforts of what is called maturity: pleasant companionship, comfort, proper holidays. It is a reasonable prospect.

I am not a romantic. I am a domestic animal. I do not sigh and yearn for extravagant displays of passion, for the grand affair, the world well lost for love. I know all that, and know that it leaves you lonely. No, what I crave is the simplicity of routine.
An evening walk, arm in arm, in fine weather. A game of cards. Time for idle talk. Preparing a meal together.'

I cannot think or act or speak or write or even dream with any kind of a energy in the absence of love. I feel excluded from the living world. I become cold, fish-like, immobile. I implode. My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. Every evening.

People expect writers to entertain them, she reflected. They consider that writers should be gratified simply by performing their task to the audience's satisfaction.

For this was a land of prudently harvested plenty, a land which had conquered human accidents, leaving only the weather distressingly beyond control.

In London or Dublin the girls would look back to the house for healing. The remembered light on the empty hayfields would grow magical, the green shade of the beeches would give out a delicious coolness as they tasted again the sardines between slices of bread: when they were away the house would become the summer light and shade above their whole lives.

We were never sure we'd be alive from one day to the next. Don't let them pull wool over your eyes. The war was the cold, the wet, standing to your neck in a drain for a whole night with bloodhounds on your trail, not knowing how you could manage the next step toward the end of a long march. That was the war: not when the band played and a bloody politician stepped forward to put Rowers on the ground.

If he remembered it only as it looked right now, would he miss it as much? He couldn't tell.
He stood there for maybe five minutes, but he couldn't make the house register on his mind at all. It might be any other house on the block; it might be anyone's.

When he was far away from home, and picturing what it looked like, this wasn't the way he saw it at all. He saw it as it had been when he was small - a giant of a place, with children playing on the sunlit lawn and yellow flowers growing in two straight lines along the walk. Now, as he looked at the house, he tried to make the real picture stay in his memory.

When he was across the street from his house he turned and looked back at it. It sat silently in the twilight, with the bay windows lit yellow by the lamps inside and the irregular little stained-glass and rose windows glowing here and there against the vague white clapboards.