New York in its racket and stern brown deptitude, its bottomless decline, always produces a few summer mornings like this; mornings invaded everywhere be an assertion of new life so determined it is almost comic, like a cartoon character that endures endless hideous punishments and always emerges unburnt, unscarred, and ready for more.
Michael Cunningham, The Hours
Source: dandydaily
I wanted to be a writer, that’s all. I wanted to write about it all. Everything that happens in a moment. The way the flowers looked when you carried them in your arms. This towel, how it smells, how it feels, this thread. All our feelings, yours and mine. The history of it, who we once were. Everything in the world. Everything all mixed up, like it’s all mixed up now. And I failed. I failed. No matter what you start with it ends up being so much less. Sheer fucking pride and stupidity.
Richard Brown, The Hours
Every time I watch The Hours
She’d like to tell Clarissa something, something important, but can’t get it phrased. “I love you” is easy enough. “I love you” has become almost ordinary, being said not only on anniversaries or birthdays but spontaneously, in bed or at the kitchen sink or even in cabs within hearing of foreign drivers who believe women should walk three paces behind their husbands. Sally and Clarissa are not stingy with their affections, and that of course is good, but now Sally finds that she wants to go home and say something more, something that extends not only beyond the sweet and comforting but beyond passion itself. What she wants to say has to do with all the people who’ve died; it has to do with her own feelings of enormous good fortune and imminent, devastating loss. If anything happens to Clarissa she, Sally, will go on living but she will not, exactly, survive. She will not be all right. What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy’s other half. She can bear the thought of her own death but cannot bear the thought of Clarissa’s. This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of morality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining. Now there us a cord she can follow from this moment, walking toward the subway on the Upper East Side, through tomorrow and the next day and the next, all the way to the end of her life and the end of Clarissa’s.
Michael Cunningham, The Hours
Source: marmatv
Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of these terrible times again and I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices and can’t concentrate. So I’m 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’m 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 Woolf - The Hours
She loves the world for being rude and indestructible, and she knows other people must love it too, though no one speaks specifically of reasons. Why else do we struggle to go on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed? Even if we’re fleshless, blazing with legions, shitting in the sheets; still, we want desperately to live.
Michael Cunningham, The Hours
Source: anenlighteningellipses
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