59 The Hours Quotes (2024)

The Hours

Virginia Woolf: You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.

The Hours

[last lines]
Virginia Woolf: [Narrating the letter] Dear Leonard. 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.

The Hours

Virginia Woolf: Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. It's contrast.

The Hours

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.

The Hours

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

The Hours

Laura Brown: It would be wonderful to say you regretted it. It would be easy. But what does it mean? What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. There it is. No one's going to forgive me. It was death. I chose life.

The Hours

[first lines]
Virginia Woolf: [Narrating the letter] Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel I can't go through another one of these terrible times and I shant recover this time. I begin to hear voices and can't concentrate. So, I am doing what seems to be the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way

all that anyone could be. I know that I am spoiling your life and without me you could work and you will, I know. You see I can't even write this properly. What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. Everything is gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I

don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. Virginia

The Hours

Virginia Woolf: I'm dying in this town.
Leonard Woolf: If you were thinking clearly, Virginia, you would recall it was London that brought you low.
Virginia Woolf: If I were thinking clearly? If I were thinking clearly?
Leonard Woolf: We brought you to Richmond to give you peace.
Virginia

Woolf: If I were thinking clearly, Leonard, I would tell you that I wrestle alone in the dark, in the deep dark, and that only I can know. Only I can understand my condition. You live with the threat, you tell me you live with the threat of my extinction. Leonard, I live with it too.

The Hours

Clarissa Vaughn: That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other.

The Hours

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

The Hours

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. I wish, for your sake, Leonard, I could be happy in this

quietness.
[pause]
Virginia Woolf: But if it is a choice between Richmond and death, I choose death.

The Hours

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

The Hours

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.

The Hours

Laura Brown: It's a terrible thing, to outlive your entire family.

The Hours

Richard Brown: Like that morning, when you walked out of that old house and you were, you were eighteen, and maybe I was nineteen. I was nineteen years old, and I'd never seen anything so beautiful. You, coming out of a glass door in your early morning, still sleepy. Isn't it strange, the most ordinary morning in anybody's life? I'm afraid I can't make it to the party, Clarissa.

You've been so good to me, Mrs. Dalloway, I love you. I don't think two people could have been happier than we've been.

The Hours

[in 1921]
Virginia Woolf: [writing in her book] Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
[in 1951]
Laura Brown: [reading in bed] Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
[in 2001]
Clarissa Vaughan: Sally, I think I'll buy the flowers myself.
[waking up]
Sally

Lester: What? What flowers?
[realizing]
Sally Lester: Oh, shit! I forgot!

The Hours

Clarissa Vaughn: All right Richard, do me one simple favor. Come. Come sit.
Richard Brown: I don't think I can make it to the party, Clarissa.
Clarissa Vaughn: 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 you don't want to do. You can do as you like.
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...
Clarissa Vaughn: You do have good days still. You know you do.
Richard Brown: Not really. I mean, it's kind of you to say so, but it's not really true.

The Hours

Virginia Woolf: I am saying, Vanessa, that even crazy people like to be asked.

The Hours

Leonard Woolf: If I didn't know you better I'd call this ingratitude.
Virginia Woolf: I am ungrateful? You call ME ungrateful? My life has been stolen from me. I'm living in a town I have no wish to live in... I'm living a life I have no wish to live... How did this happen?