To the Lighthouse Quotations for Quotation Test__________________
Part I
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9.
“Yes, of course, if it’s fine to-morrow,” said Mrs. Ramsay. “But you’ll have to be up with the
lark,” she added. (Mrs. Ramsay)
“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” (43). (Lily Briscoe of Mrs.
Ramsay)
“[She] often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions” (56). (Mrs.
Ramsay of herself)
“He reached Q. . . He would never reach R” (58). (Mr. Ramsay of himself).
“Women can’t paint, women can’t write . . . “ (68). (Charles Tansley to Lily Briscoe)
“Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one?” (70). (Lily Briscoe )
“They were happier now than they would ever be again” (76). (Mrs. Ramsay of her family)
“She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of—to think;
well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone” (79). (Mrs. Ramsay of herself)
“He wanted something—wanted the thing she always found it so difficult to give him; wanted
her to tell him that she loved him. And that, no, she could not do” (124). (Mrs. Ramsay of Mr.
Ramsay)
Part II
10. “[But] Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, he stretched his arms out.
They remained empty” (131). (parenthetical aside)
11. “Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a
tragedy, people said” (135). (parenthetical aside)
12. “A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew
Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous” (135). (parenthetical aside with historical
allusion to WWI)
Part III (ten years after Part I)
13. “What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on
one with years. The great revelation had never come. . . . Instead there were the little daily
miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one” (156). (Lily
Briscoe)
14. “He has landed,” she said aloud. “It is finished” (191). (Lily Briscoe of James, Mr. Ramsay, and
Cam)
15. “I have had my vision” (192). (Lily Briscoe—the last sentence of the novel).