The Hours (film)

"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."

"Leonard, I believe I may have a first sentence."

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

"It's on this day. This day of all days. Her fate becomes clear to her."

"I can't think of anything more exhilarating than a trip to London."

"I am saying, Vanessa, that even crazy people like to be asked."

"Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards 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."

"I am attended by doctors! Everywhere, I am attended by doctors who inform me of my own interests."

"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?"

"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 own condition. You live with the threat, you tell me you live with the threat of my extinction. Leonard, I live with it too. 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. But if it is a choice between Richmond and death, I choose death."

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard."

"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."

"I'm gonna make a cake. That's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna make the cake for daddy's birthday."

"Obviously, you feel unworthy. Gives you feelings of unworthiness. You survive and they don't."

"There are times when you don't belong and you think you're going to kill yourself. Once I went to a hotel. Later that night I made a plan. The plan was I would leave my family when my second child was born. And that's what I did. I got up one morning, made breakfast, went to the bus stop, got on a bus. I'd left a note. I got a job in a library in Canada. 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."

"That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other."

"Why is everything wrong?"

"When I'm with him I feel... Yes, I am living. And when I'm not with him... Yes, everything does seem sort of silly."

"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 this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It never occurred to wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then."

"Oh, Mrs. Dalloway... Always giving parties to cover the silence."

"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."

"Would you be angry if I died?"

"Just wait till I die. Then you'll have to think of yourself. How are you going to like that?"

"I had this fantastic notion. I took the Xanax and the Ritalin together. It had never occurred to me!"

"I've stayed alive for you. But now you have to let me go."

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

"Leonard: Do you think it's possible that bad writing actually attracts a higher incidence of error?"

"Sally: Why do I always have to sit next to the exes? Is this some kind of a hint, sweetheart? And anyway, shouldn't the exes have a table of their own where they can all ex together in ex-quisite agony?"

"Kitty: All my life I could do everything. I could do anything, really. Except the one thing I wanted."

"Kitty: I don't think you can call yourself a woman until you're a mother."

"Louis: The day I left him I got on a train and made my way across Europe. I felt free for the first time in years."

"Vanessa: Your aunt is a very lucky woman, Angelica. She has two lives. She has the life she is leading and also the books she is writing."

"Julia: They're all here, aren't they? All the ghosts... All the ghosts are assembling for the party!"

"Dan: The thought of this life, that's what kept me going. I had an idea of our happiness."

"Julia: So that's the monster."

"We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds & expectations, to burst open & give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so... There she is with another hour before her."

"Nicole Kidman - Virginia Woolf"

"Julianne Moore - Laura Brown"

"Meryl Streep - Clarissa Vaughan"

"Ed Harris - Richard Brown"