How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
She imagines turning around, taking the stone out of her pocket, going back to the house. She could probably return in time to destroy the notes. She could live on; she could perform that final kindness. Standing knee-deep in the moving water, she decides against it. The voices are here, the headache is coming, and if she restores herself to the care of Leonard and Vanessa they won't let her go again, will they? She decides to insist that they let her go. (Prologue.1)
Although Virginia Woolf loves her husband and sister very much and knows that her death will break their hearts, her love for them has its limits. She refuses to live on in misery just for their sakes, and by explaining her decision in this way, Michael Cunningham draws a clear connection between Virginia's suicide, Richard Brown's suicide, and the attempted suicide of Laura Brown.
Quote #2
[…] You have
given me
the greatest possible happiness. You
have been in every way all that anyone
could be. I don't think two
people could have been happier till
this terrible disease came. (Prologue.3)
In the suicide note that Virginia Woolf leaves for her husband, Leonard, Virginia chooses to say her goodbyes by telling Leonard how much he meant to her. Michael Cunningham didn't create this note himself: it's a transcript of the real note that the real Virginia Woolf left behind.
Quote #3
She loves Richard, she thinks of him constantly, but she perhaps loves the day slightly more. She loves West Tenth Street on an ordinary summer morning. She feels like a sluttish widow, freshly peroxided under her black veil, with her eye on the eligible men at her husband's wake.
Like her namesake, the original Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Vaughan is in love with life, despite its many tragedies. Even the impending death of her dearest friend Richard Brown doesn't prevent her from feeling wonderful on a bright, sunny day.
Quote #4
She's endured teasing on the subject for more than thirty years; she decided long ago to give in and enjoy her own voluptuous, undisciplined responses, which, as Richard put it, tend to be as unkind and adoring as those of a particularly irritating, precocious child. She knows that a poet like Richard would move sternly through the same morning, editing it, dismissing incidental ugliness along with incidental beauty, seeking the economic and historical truth behind these old brick town houses, the austere stone complications of the Episcopal church and the thin middle-aged man walking his Jack Russell terrier […]. (1.6)
Clarissa Vaughan's "undisciplined" capacity to love is very different from that of her best friend, Richard Brown. Even though Clarissa is a professional editor, it is Richard, the poet, who is much more likely to "edit" the world and, in doing so, restrict his enjoyment of it.
Quote #5
If she were to express it publicly (now, at her age), this love of hers would consign her to the realm of the duped and the simpleminded. Christians with acoustic guitars or wives who've agreed to be harmless in exchange for their keep. Still, this indiscriminate love of hers feels entirely serious to her, as if everything in the world is part of a vast, inscrutable intention and everything in the world has its own secret name, a name that cannot be conveyed in language but is simply the sight and feel of the thing itself. (1.6)
Is it really so silly and simple-minded to love as broadly and "indiscriminately" as Clarissa Vaughan does? All things considered, The Hours doesn't seem to think so. Even in its darkest moments, the book is a celebration of human life.
Quote #6
Leonard looks up at her, still wearing, for a moment, the scowl he has brought to the proofs. It is an expression she trusts and fears, his eyes blazing and impenetrably dark under his heavy brows, the corners of his mouth turned down in an expression of judgment that is severe but not in any way petulant or trivial […]. As he looks at her, though, the expression fades almost immediately and is replaced by the milder, kinder face of the husband who has nursed her through her worst periods, who does not demand what she can't provide and who urges on her, sometimes successfully, a glass of milk every morning at eleven. (2.8)
The love between Virginia and Leonard Woolf is reflected in the kindness they show each other. Although there doesn't seem to be much romantic or sexual passion in their marriage, that doesn't seem to be a problem: the two have other bonds that tie them together.
Quote #7
Here is the brilliant spirit, the woman of sorrows, the woman of transcendent joys, who would rather be elsewhere, who has consented to perform simple and essentially foolish tasks, to examine tomatoes, to sit under a hair dryer, because it is her art and her duty. Because the war is over, the world has survived, and we are here, all of us, making homes, having and raising children, creating not just books or paintings but a whole world—a world of order and harmony where children are safe (if not happy), where men who have seen horrors beyond imagining, who have acted bravely and well, come home to lighted windows, to perfume, to plates, to napkins. (3.14)
For her part, Laura Brown sometimes feels that all of the little things that she does daily to show her love for her husband and son are just part of one big show—a show that many American women are putting on simply because it seems like the right thing to do.
Quote #8
What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other. (8.31)
This one perfect moment from Clarissa Vaughan's youth resembles the moment that Virginia Woolf imagines for her heroine, Mrs. Dalloway—a single kiss, the memory of which will last a lifetime. For Clarissa, none of this discounts the genuine love that she feels for her long-term partner, Sally, but this "singular perfection" does stand out from every other moment in her life.
Quote #9
He says, "I don't know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that."
"You don't have to go to the party. You don't have to go to the ceremony. You don't have to do anything at all."
"But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick." (18.21-23)
Like Virginia Woolf, Richard Brown isn't willing to continue living on in misery just for the sake of his loved ones. Clarissa Vaughan has suspected that Richard doesn't love the world like she does, and, in the end, her suspicions turn out to be right.
Quote #10
"I love you. Does that sound trite?"
"No."
Richard smiles. He shakes his head. He says, "I don't think two people could have been happier than we've been."
He inches forward, slides gently off the sill, and falls. (18.59-62)
Richard Brown's final words to Clarissa Vaughan echo Virginia Woolf's suicide note directly. Like Virginia, Richard chooses to let go of both love and life when he feels that they can't last much longer.