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.