How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Her shoes sink slightly into the soft earth. She has failed, and now the voices are back, muttering indistinctly just beyond the range of her vision, behind her, here, no, turn and they've gone somewhere else. The voices are back and the headache is approaching as surely as rain, the headache that will crush whatever is she and replace her with itself. (Prologue.1)
The Hours opens with the final moments of Virginia Woolf's life. Because Virginia believes that she is relapsing into an illness that once threatened her sanity and her own sense of self, she has decided to reject the illness by taking her own life.
Quote #2
Clarissa's shoes make their soft sandpaper sounds as she descends the stair on her way to buy flowers. Why doesn't she feel more somber about Richard's perversely simultaneous good fortune ("an anguished, prophetic voice in American letters") and his decline ("You have no T-cells at all, none that we can detect")? What is wrong with her? (1.6)
Very early on in The Hours, we learn that Richard Brown is dying of AIDS. With one of its three narratives set in a gay community in New York City at "the end of the twentieth century" (1.2), the novel is full of characters who have lost or are losing loved ones to this devastating disease.
Quote #3
Still, she loves the world for being rude and indestructible, and she knows other people must love it too, poor as well as rich, though no one speaks specifically of the reasons. Why else do we struggle to go on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed? Even if we're further gone than Richard; even if we're fleshless, blazing with lesions, shitting in the sheets; still, we want desperately to live. (1.9)
Clarissa Vaughan has an undeniable lust for life, and there are times when that makes it hard for her to understand that others—like her best friend Richard Brown—may not feel the same. Clarissa simply assumes that no matter how bad things get, Richard will always want to go on living.
Quote #4
"What are you doing in New York on a Saturday?" she asks.
"Evan and I are staying in town this weekend," he says. "He's feeling so much better on this new cocktail, he says he wants to go dancing tonight."
"Isn't that a little much?"
"I'll keep an eye on him. I won't let him overdo it. He just wants to be out in the world again." (1.12-15)
Walter Hardy is another one of the novel's characters who have been taking care of loved ones living with AIDS. Walter and his partner, Evan, have been more fortunate than Richard Brown. Unlike Richard, Evan is still healthy enough to benefit from new medications that are being developed.
Quote #5
She is aware of her reflected movements in the glass but does not permit herself to look. The mirror is dangerous; it sometimes shows her the dark manifestation of air that matches her body, takes her form, but stands behind, watching her, with porcine eyes and wet, hushed breathing. (2.5)
The manifestations of Virginia Woolf's illness terrify her, and with good reason. Who wouldn't freak out if they saw a shadowy, pig-eyed version of themselves lurking in the mirror?
Quote #6
She should be standing before the stove in her new robe, full of simple, encouraging talk. Still, when she opened her eyes a few minutes ago (after seven already!)—when she still half inhabited her dream, some sort of pulsating machinery in the remote distance, a steady pounding like a gigantic mechanical heart, which seemed to be drawing nearer—she felt the dank sensation around her, the nowhere feeling, and knew it was going to be a difficult day. (3.4)
Laura Brown's struggles with depression forge a connection between her, Virginia Woolf, and the adult Richard Brown. All three of them live with some form of illness or suffering that makes it difficult for them to get through each day.
Quote #7
How can she help resenting Evan and all the others who got the new drugs in time; all the fortunate ("fortunate" being, of course, a relative term) men and women whose minds had not yet been eaten into lace by the virus. How can she help feeling angry on behalf of Richard, whose muscles and organs have been revived by the new discoveries but whose mind seems to have passed beyond any sort of repair other than the conferring of good days among the bad. (4.24)
Clarissa Vaughan knows that her dearest friend, Richard Brown, will not survive his illness. She doesn't exactly get in a huff about the better fortune of those who will survive, but who can blame her for resenting the hand that Richard was dealt?
Quote #8
"Are they here today?" Clarissa asks.
"No," Richard answers, with the reluctant candor of a child. "They're gone now. They're very beautiful and quite terrible."
"Yes," she says. "I know."
"I think of them as coalescences of black fire, I mean they're dark and bright at the same time. There was one that looked a bit like a black, electrified jellyfish. They were singing, just now, in a foreign language. I believe it may have been Greek. Archaic Greek." (4.48-51)
One of the manifestations of Richard Brown's illness is his tendency to see and hear Greek-speaking beings in his apartment. This is another one of the ideas that Michael Cunningham lifted directly from Mrs. Dalloway, and The Hours draws extra attention to it by giving Virginia Woolf a very similar problem.
Quote #9
He says, "I don't know if I can bear it, Clarissa."
"Bear what?"
"Being proud and brave in front of everybody. I recall it vividly. There I am, a sick, crazy wreck reaching out with trembling hands to receive his little trophy."
"Honey, you don't need to be proud. You don't need to be brave. It's not a performance."
"Of course it is. I got a prize for my performance, you must know that. I got a prize for having AIDS and going nuts and being brave about it, it had nothing to do with my work." (4.81-85)
It upsets Richard Brown to think that his writing is only being honored because of his illness, and not because of the merit of the work itself. (It's not at all clear if that's actually true, but it's the way he feels about it.) He doesn't want to be held up as a paragon of bravery through suffering: all he has ever wanted to do is produce brilliant writing.
Quote #10
At those times the headache moves out of her skull and into the world. Everything glows and pulses. Everything is infected with brightness, throbbing with it, and she prays for dark the way a wanderer lost in the desert prays for water. […] When she's crossed over to this realm of relentless brilliance, the voices start. Sometimes they are low, disembodied grumblings that coalesce out of the air itself; sometimes they emanate from behind the furniture or inside the walls. […] A flock of sparrows outside her window once sang, unmistakably, in Greek. (5.4)
Not only does this passage echo an earlier one in The Hours, drawing an unmistakable connection between Virginia Woolf and Richard Brown, but it also echoes Woolf's own Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia and Richard are separate mirror images of Septimus Warren Smith—a poet and WWI veteran who, in Mrs. Dalloway, suffers from undiagnosed PTSD and in the end takes his own life.