Favourite Quote from My Favourite Book // 30-Day Book Challenge - Day 17

Today is the seventeenth day of the 30-day book challenge, in which I will be writing about a different book or book series every day for 30 days, with each book chosen according to the daily prompt. Today's prompt is: "favourite quote from your favourite book".

Welcome back to the 30-day book challenge. Today we will be featuring some of the classics you all know and love, including: Mary-tries-and-fails-to-pick-favourites and outrageously-delayed-posts. Rather than give you all the details of my indecisiveness this time, I'm going to skip all of that and get to the point of this post. My chosen book for today's prompt is Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, one of my favourite books of all time.

In specific, this post is meant to focus on my favourite quote from the novel. The quote I remember the best and appreciate the most just so happens to be one of the most well-known from the book, but that doesn't make it any less meaningful to me:

'She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxicabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.'

I won't go into great depth regarding the plot of Mrs Dalloway, as that will be necessary in a later post. However, I will say that this scene comes near the beginning of the book, when the titular Clarissa Dalloway has set out into London in search of flowers for her party later. These sentences, typical of the book's stream-of-consciousness style, appear when she is in the midst of the bustle of the busy city.

One of the reasons I chose this quote is because it accurately represents a feeling which is common to me at the moment, as I am living in a city for the first time in my life: urban isolation. It's both a great and terrible thing about being in a crowded urban environment, that even when you are surrounded constantly by people, noise, and activity, you can still personally feel very alone. 

This quote encapsulates that feeling, but more than that, it also illustrates another divide that is deeper than simply personal/urban: the contrast between our inner and outer lives. This is a major theme in Mrs Dalloway, which often blends Clarissa's real-life experiences with her thoughts and memories, in a way that simultaneously shrinks and draws attention to the disconnect between them. 

Finally, in the last phrase of this quote - indeed the one which I see most frequently quoted alone - Clarissa reflects on the precariousness of life. I like this phrase partially for its ambiguity; what exactly is the danger in living? Is it simply the danger of death? Or is it something else, any of the myriad threats we open ourselves up to just by engaging with the world around us - not physical harm, but emotional. 

Clarissa is a woman who feels things deeply, but as we have already discussed, she is also a person who struggles to balance her internal and external lives. Perhaps her interpretation of 'danger' is literal or perhaps it has a subtler meaning. If you (like me) are not certain of her meaning, I would guess that Clarissa isn't entirely sure which she is referring to either.