archive: 26 january 2008: the hours

Quotes from "The Hours" by Michael Cunningham (novel) and David Hare (screenplay) and Stephen Daldry (director).

Richard Brown: "But I still have to face the hours, don't I? I mean, the hours after the party, and the hours after that... "

Virginia Woolf: "You cannot find peace by avoiding life."

Virginia Woolf: "This is my right; it is the right of every human being. I choose not the suffocating anesthetic of the suburbs, but the violent jolt of the Capital, that is my choice. The meanest patient, yes, even the very lowest is allowed some say in the matter of her own prescription. Thereby she defines her humanity."

Virginia Woolf: "To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard, always the years between us, always the years. Always the love. Always the hours."

Virginia Woolf: "A woman's whole life in a single day. Just one day. And in that day her whole life."

Laura Brown: "Oh, it's about this woman who's incredibly - well, she's a hostess and she's incredibly confident and she's going to give a party. And, maybe because she's confident, everyone thinks she's fine... but she isn't."

Richard Brown: "Oh, Mrs. Dalloway... Always giving parties to cover the silence."

Virginia Woolf: "Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more."

Angelica Bell: What happens when we die?
Virginia Woolf: What happens? [pause] We return to the place that we came from.
Angelica Bell: I don't remember where I came from.
Virginia Woolf: Nor do I.

Clarissa Vaughn: "I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself: So, this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then."

Richard Brown: "Would you be angry if I died? "

Clarissa Vaughn: "When I'm with him I feel... Yes, I am living. And when I'm not with him... Yes, everything does seem sort of silly."

Virginia Woolf: "Did it matter, then, she asked herself, walking toward Bond Street. Did it matter that she must inevitably cease, completely. All this must go on without her. Did she resent it? Or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? It is possible to die. It is possible to die."