How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
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.