The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia WoolfHow fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen;
She could not sit beside him when he stared so and did not see her and made everything terrible;
To love makes one solitary, she thought. She could tell nobody,
Nothing could make her happy without him! Nothing! He was selfish. So men are. For he was not ill. Dr. Holmes said there was nothing the matter with him. She spread her hand before her. Look! Her wedding ring slipped—she had grown so thin. It was she who suffered—but she had nobody to tell.
Her words faded. So a rocket fades. Its sparks, having grazed their way into the night, surrender to it, dark descends, pours over the outlines of houses and towers; bleak hillsides soften and fall in. But though they are gone, the night is full of them; robbed of colour, blank of windows, they exist more ponderously, give out what the frank daylight fails to transmit—the trouble and suspense of things conglomerated there in the darkness; huddled together in the darkness; reft of the relief which dawn brings when, washing the walls white and grey, spotting each window-pane, lifting the mist from the fields, showing the red-brown cows peacefully grazing, all is once more decked out to the eye; exists again.
Dr. Holmes had told her to make him notice real things,
“Oh look,” she implored him. But what was there to look at? A few sheep. That was all.
she could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet.
as if the random uproar of the traffic had whispered through hollowed hands his name, not Peter, but his private name which he called himself in his own thoughts. “You,” she said, only “you,” saying it with her white gloves and her shoulders.
Sir William said he never spoke of “madness”; he called it not having a sense of proportion.
Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion, until the mound of time was so far diminished that a commercial clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street, announced, genially and fraternally, as if it were a pleasure to Messrs. Rigby and Lowndes to give the information gratis, that it was half-past one.
she felt herself everywhere; not “here, here, here”; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere.
Every time she gave a party she had this feeling of being something not herself,
Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami