She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on.She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, 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. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fräulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.
This passage has stayed with me for years. It gives the flexibility of Clarissa and her humanity and Woolf paces the process of Clarissa’s thinking perfectly. It is as if the words are creating themselves on the page as Clarissa experiences them. It reads as an awakening into revelation, or perhaps this is too bold a statement. Perhaps it is more the process denotes acceptance and thus the serenity of her abnegation of fixity remains and has remained for me over 20 years!