- Clarissa Vaughn: 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: So, this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It *was* happiness. It was the moment. Right then.
- [last lines]
- Virginia Woolf: [Narrating the letter] 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.
- Laura Brown: 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.
- [first lines]
- Virginia Woolf: [Narrating the letter] Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel I can't go through another one of these terrible times and I shant recover this time. I begin to hear voices and can't concentrate. So, I am 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 am 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
- Virginia Woolf: Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. It's contrast.
- Leonard Woolf: And who will die? Tell me.
- Virginia Woolf: The poet will die. The visionary.
- Virginia Woolf: I'm dying in this town.
- Leonard Woolf: If you were thinking clearly, Virginia, you would recall it was London that brought you low.
- Virginia Woolf: If I were thinking clearly? If I were thinking clearly?
- Leonard Woolf: We brought you to Richmond to give you peace.
- Virginia Woolf: 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 condition. You live with the threat, you tell me you live with the threat of my extinction. Leonard, I live with it too.
- Virginia Woolf: Did it matter, then, she asked herself, walking toward 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.
- [in 1921]
- Virginia Woolf: [writing in her book] Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
- [in 1951]
- Laura Brown: [reading in bed] Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
- [in 2001]
- Clarissa Vaughan: Sally, I think I'll buy the flowers myself.
- [waking up]
- Sally Lester: What? What flowers?
- [realizing]
- Sally Lester: Oh, shit! I forgot!
- Clarissa Vaughn: All right Richard, do me one simple favor. Come. Come sit.
- Richard Brown: I don't think I can make it to the party, Clarissa.
- Clarissa Vaughn: You don't have to go to the party, you don't have to go to the ceremony, you don't have to do anything you don't want to do. You can do as you like.
- Richard Brown: But I still have to face the hours, don't I? I mean, the hours after the party, and the hours after that...
- Clarissa Vaughn: You do have good days still. You know you do.
- Richard Brown: Not really. I mean, it's kind of you to say so, but it's not really true.
- Virginia Woolf: 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.
- [pause]
- Virginia Woolf: But if it is a choice between Richmond and death, I choose death.
- Angelica Bell: What happens when we die?
- Virginia Woolf: What happens?
- [pause]
- Virginia Woolf: We return to the place that we came from.
- Angelica Bell: I don't remember where I came from.
- Virginia Woolf: Nor do I.
- Kitty: Oh, you're reading a book?
- Laura Brown: Yeah.
- Kitty: What's this one about?
- Laura Brown: Oh, it's about this woman who's incredibly - well, she's a hostess and she's incredibly confident and she's going to give a party. And, maybe because she's confident, everyone thinks she's fine... but she isn't.
- Leonard Woolf: If I didn't know you better I'd call this ingratitude.
- Virginia Woolf: 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?
- Virginia Woolf: I am attended by doctors. Everywhere. I am attended by doctors who inform me of my own interests.
- Richard Brown: Like that morning, when you walked out of that old house and you were, you were eighteen, and maybe I was nineteen. I was nineteen years old, and I'd never seen anything so beautiful. You, coming out of a glass door in your early morning, still sleepy. Isn't it strange, the most ordinary morning in anybody's life? I'm afraid I can't make it to the party, Clarissa. You've been so good to me, Mrs. Dalloway, I love you. I don't think two people could have been happier than we've been.
- Richard Brown: Just wait till I die. Then you'll have to think of yourself. How are you going to like that?
- Virginia Woolf: I was going to kill my heroine. But I've changed my mind. I fear I may have to kill someone else, instead.
- Vanessa Bell: Your aunt is a very lucky woman Angelica. She has two lives. The life she is living, and the book she is writing.
- Clarissa Vaughn: I don't know what's happening. I'm sorry. I seem to be in some strange sort of mood. I'm sorry - it's very rude of me. I seem to be unravelling.
- Vanessa Bell: Virginia.
- Virginia Woolf: Leonard thinks it's the end of civilization: People who are invited at 4 and arrive at 2:30.
- Vanessa Bell: Oh God.
- Virginia Woolf: Barbarians.
- Laura Brown: Obviously, you... feel unworthy. Gives you feelings of unworthiness. You survive and they don't.
- Angelica Bell: What were you thinking about?
- Virginia Woolf: I was going to kill my heroine. But I've changed my mind.
- Sally: Why do I always have to sit next to the exes? Is this some kind of a hint, sweetheart? Anyway, shouldn't the exes have a table of their own, where they can all ex together in ex-quisite agony?
- Leonard Woolf: Do you think it's possible that bad writing actually attracts a higher incidence of error?
- Clarissa Vaughn: One morning in Wellfleet, you were there, we were all there, I'd been sleeping with him and I was out on the back porch. He came out behind me and put his arm on my shoulder. "Good morning, Mrs. Dalloway." From then on I've - been stuck.
- Louis Waters: Stuck?
- Clarissa Vaughn: Yep. With the name, I mean.
- Richard Brown: Who is this party for?
- Clarissa Vaughan: What are you asking, what are you trying to say?
- Richard Brown: I'm not trying to say anything. I think I'm staying alive just to satisfy you.
- Laura Brown: We're baking the cake to show him that we love him.
- Richie Brown: Otherwise he won't know we love him?
- Laura Brown: That's right.
- Clarissa Vaughan: Just to let you know I am making the crab thing. Not that I imagine it makes any difference to you.
- Richard Brown: Of course it makes a difference. I love the crab thing.
- Clarissa Vaughn: 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.
- Louis Waters: 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.
- Clarissa Vaughn: He gives me that look.
- Julia: What look?
- Clarissa Vaughn: To say your life is trivial. You are so trivial.
- Laura Brown: Don't worry, honey. Everything's fine. We're going to have a wonderful party. We've made Daddy such a nice cake.
- Julia: You can't see that Louis Waters is weird?
- Clarissa Vaughn: I can see that he's sad.
- Julia: Well. All of your friends are sad.
- Richard Brown: I had this wonderful notion. I took the Xanax and the Ritalin together. It had never occurred to me!