Oh, Mrs. Dalloway. Always giving parties to cover the silence. - Michael Cunningham

What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half.

Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself.

If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences, though it runs like veins of brilliant metal through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance