How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
How, Laura wonders, could someone who was able to write a sentence like that—who was able to feel everything contained in a sentence like that—come to kill herself? What in the world is wrong with people? Summoning resolve, as if she were about to dive into cold water, Laura closes the book and lays it on the nightstand. She does not dislike her child, does not dislike her husband. She will rise and be cheerful. (3.13)
Not only does Laura Brown need to work up the willpower to get out of bed and face the day, but there are also moments when she has to remind herself that she likes her husband and child. Laura is so unhappy with her life that she finds it hard to feel unconditionally positive about any part of it.
Quote #5
She, Laura, likes to imagine (it's one of her most closely held secrets) that she has a touch of brilliance herself, just a hint of it, though she knows most people probably walk around with similar hopeful suspicions curled up like tiny fists inside them, never divulged. (3.14)
Can anyone else relate? How many of us dream of having secret skills and talents that no one in our lives would ever suspect? How many of us believe that we may be undiscovered geniuses, or prospective superheroes?
Quote #6
She brushes her teeth, brushes her hair, and starts downstairs. She pauses several treads from the bottom, listening, waiting; she is again possessed (it seems to be getting worse) by a dreamlike feeling, as if she is standing in the wings, about to go onstage and perform in a play for which she is not appropriately dressed, and for which she has not adequately rehearsed. What, she wonders, is wrong with her. This is her husband in the kitchen; this is her little boy. All the man and boy require of her is her presence and, of course, her love. (3.17)
Although performance metaphors appear in all three of The Hours' narratives, Laura Brown experiences this "dreamlike feeling" more strongly and more frequently than either Virginia Woolf or Clarissa Vaughan. Her life as a suburban housewife feels uncanny to her—so strange and unfamiliar that sometimes it hardly seems real.