Quotes about hour
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“Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Source: Studies in Nature and Literature

“In those first few hours officially single again the world seems like it expands, suddenly bigger and more vast now that you have to get through it alone.”

Sarah Dessen book This Lullaby

Source: This Lullaby

World

“Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle’s heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Old Man and the Sea

Source: The Old Man and the Sea

People, Heart

“Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.”

E. Lockhart book We Were Liars

Source: We Were Liars

“The thing about plummetting downhill at fifty miles an hour on a snack platter - if you realize it's a bad idea when you're halfway down, it's too late.”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

Idea

“You’re sarcastic twelve hours a day, but you’re almost never spiteful. You have a good heart under all the glitter.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Course of True Love [and First Dates]

Heart

“Nobody looks good in their darkest hour. But it's those hours that make us what we are. We stand strong, or we cower. We emerge victorious, tempered by our trails, or fracture by a permanent, damning fault line.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Faefever

Strong, Victory

“I'm numb and I'm tired. Too much has happened today. I feel as if I'd been out in a pounding rain for forty-eight hours without an umbrella or a coat. I'm soaked to the skin with emotion.”

Ray Bradbury book The Martian Chronicles

Source: The Martian Chronicles

Feeling

“Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Source: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Heart

“She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims…”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

Source: The God of Small Things

Secret, Flowers

“You said you'd give me half an hour!'
'And you said you'd satisfy me whenever I wanted it. I want it now.' He removed is jacket. 'Drop the towel.'
'I-I never agreed to be naked!”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: If You Deceive

“Except, now that I don’t have a car, I can’t really make good on my birthday promise.”

Sydney thought about it for several moments. “Well. I’ve got a car.”

An hour later, I vowed I’d never make fun of that Mazda again.”

Richelle Mead book The Fiery Heart

Source: The Fiery Heart

Cars, Birthday

“You should see my corgis at sunset in the snow. It's their finest hour. About five o'clock they glow like copper. Then they come in and lie in front of the fire like a string of sausages.”

Tasha Tudor (1915–2008) American illustrator and writer

Source: The Private World of Tasha Tudor

Lie

“You want to play video games twenty-four hours a day?"
"Or watch. I just want to not be me. Whether it's sleeping or playing video games or riding my bike or studying. Giving my brain up. That's what's important.”

Ned Vizzini book It's Kind of a Funny Story

Source: It's Kind of a Funny Story

Game, Sleep, Study

“… It's just one hour. Just one little hour. What could happen in one hour?”

Jim Butcher book Ghost Story

Source: Ghost Story

“… Time does not heal,
It makes a half-stitched scar
That can be broken and again you feel
Grief as total as in its first hour.
-Elizabeth Jennings”

Kay Redfield Jamison (1946) American bipolar disorder researcher

Source: Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide

Feeling, Time

“The mature man lives quietly, does good privately, takes responsibility for his actions, treats others with friendliness and courtesy, finds mischief boring and avoids it. Without the hidden conspiracy of goodwill, society would not endure an hour.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

“Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours, and nothing is fabulous any more.”

Roald Dahl (1916–1990) British novelist, short story writer, poet, fighter pilot and screenwriter

World

“such hours are beautiful to live, but very hard to describe…”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

Source: Little Women

Beauty

“Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.”

Janet Frame (1924–2004) New Zealand author

Imagination

“I know what it's like to squander all your hours and all your tears and all your heart on something which turns out to be nothing. Don't waste your time.”

Sophie Kinsella book Twenties Girl

Source: Twenties Girl

Tear, Time, Heart

“The habit of reading is the only one I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will be there to support you when all other resources are gone. It will be present to you when the energies of your body have fallen away from you. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.”

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) English novelist (1815-1882)

As quoted in Forbes (April 1948), p. 42
Variant: The habit of reading is the only one I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will be there to support you when all other resources are gone. . . . It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.

Pleasure, Support, Reading

“I think the sun is a flower,
That blooms for just one hour.”

Ray Bradbury book All Summer in a Day

Source: All Summer in a Day

Flowers, Thinking, Sun

“Happiness, not in another place but this place… not for another hour, but this hour.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Happiness, Happy

“Good words," I replied. "But deeds must prove it also; and after he is well, remember you don't forget resolutions formed in the hour of fear.”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Source: Wuthering Heights

Fear, Forgetting

“Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

War, World, Thinking, Memory

“sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will make me cry by myself in a corner for hours.”

Eric Idle (1943) British comedian, actor, singer and writer

Cry

“If you listen to the radio for a whole hour there's maybe one decent song. The rest is mass-produced garbage”

Haruki Murakami book Dance Dance Dance

Source: Dance Dance Dance

“If one believed in angels one would feel that they must love us best when we are asleep and cannot hurt each other; and what a mercy it is that once in every twenty-four hours we are too utterly weary to go on being unkind.”

Elizabeth von Arnim (1866–1941) Australian writer

Source: The Solitary Summer

Love, Angels, Feeling, Hurt

“To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Perfection, Night

“In the darkest hours we must believe in ourselves.”

Terry Goodkind Faith of the Fallen

Source: Faith of the Fallen

“Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.”

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) Priest and author

Love, Learning, Heart

“A poem by Margot Bickel

A little peace
within the last hours of the almost bygone day
a little silence
between the days
so that the nascent yesterday does not get in the past
and tomorrow is lived for today”

Margot Bickel (1958) German poet

Peace, Silence, Past

“I am not menopausal. I just wanted half an hour alone. Is that too much to ask? A crappy half hour!”

Janet Evanovich (1943) Novelist

“A life isn't measured in hours and minutes. It's the quality, not the length.”

Gabrielle Zevin book Elsewhere

Source: Elsewhere

Life

“Yes, I found myself, by insensible degrees, sincerely fond of her; and the happiest hours of my life were what I spent with her.”

Jane Austen book Sense and Sensibility

Source: Sense and Sensibility

Life, Sincerity

“TV makes it so easy to postpone living for another half hour.”

Bill McKibben (1960) American environmentalist and writer

Source: The Age of Missing Information

“I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened.”

Nancy Mitford (1904–1973) British writer

People, Thinking, Tea

“There is in every true woman's heart a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity; but which kindles up, and beams, and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.”

Washington Irving book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

"The Wife".
Source: The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820)

Heart

“Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.”

Lance Armstrong book It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life

"Back in the Saddle - An Essay by Lance Armstrong", as quoted in The Book of Action (2006) by Jeramy L. Patrick and Justin L. Helms, p. 68
Source: Armstrong, Lance. It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life. New York: Berkley Books, 2001

Pain, Motivational

“I avoid that bleak first hour of the working day during which my still sluggish senses and body make every chore a penance. I find that in arriving later, the work which I do perform is of a much higher quality.”

John Kennedy Toole A Confederacy of Dunces

Source: A Confederacy of Dunces

Sense

“There's no such thing as a tough child - if you parboil them first for seven hours, they always come out tender.”

W.C. Fields (1880–1946) actor

“It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better… while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Variant: There are two types of people in this world, good and bad. The good sleep better, but the bad seem to enjoy the waking hours much more.

People, World

“Honestly, darling," she said. "Do you even look in a mirror before you walk out the door? Your hair's a mess."

He dodged her as she reached toward his head. "Are you kidding? I spend hours in front of the mirror toit look this way.”

Richelle Mead book Spirit Bound

Source: Spirit Bound

Way

“In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted; it was the same unmistakable ache and stab across the mind, the same sighs, the same pain, and above all the same reluctance and fear to approach.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

Love, Pain, Fear, Madness

“He was going to live in New York, and be known at every restaurant and café, wearing a dress suit from early evening to early morning, sleeping away the dull hours of the forenoon.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

Sleep

“It took teams of LEP warlocks to slow down time for a few hours; the magic required to open a door to the tunnel was stupendous. It would be easier to shoot down the moon.
Opal tapped this into her notepad.
Reminder. Shoot down the moon? Viable?”

Eoin Colfer (1965) Irish author of children's books

Source: The Time Paradox

Time

“When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.”

Martin Amis book House of Meetings

Source: House of Meetings

Love

“Time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

"Juan Muraña", in Brodie's Report (1970); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)

Money, Way, Time

“Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.”

Roald Dahl (1916–1990) British novelist, short story writer, poet, fighter pilot and screenwriter

People

“Sleep is still difficult I sleep for three or four hours a day. Usually sometime in the afternoon. I walk in the cold, keep myself numb. I cry less, and less." (James Frey, pg.88)”

James Frey My Friend Leonard

Source: My Friend Leonard

Sleep, Cry

“But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another.”

Michael Cunningham book The Hours

Source: The Hours

God

“1lb beefstak, with
1pt bitter beer
every 6 hours.
1 ten-mile walk every morning.
1 bed at 11 sharp every night.
And don't stuff your head with things you don't understand.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Three Men in a Boat

Source: Three Men in a Boat

Beer, Understanding, Night

“Even the solitude, I've actually grown to quite like… I do like the feeling of getting into my little car, knowing for the next couple of hours I'll have only the roads, the big gray sky and my daydreams for company.”

Kazuo Ishiguro book Never Let Me Go

Source: Never Let Me Go

Cars, Feeling, Solitude

“I went down to the 24-hour grocery. When I got there, the guy was locking the front door. I said, 'Hey, the sign says you’re open 24 hours. He said, 'Yes, but not in a row.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

Guy

“We don't have to do this. Just say the word and I can have a jet here in an hour. We can go anywhere”

Ally Carter (1974) American writer

Source: Uncommon Criminals

“Everyday, every hour, I have held you close in my heart.”

Elizabeth Chandler (1954) writer

Source: Evercrossed

Heart

“It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Love, Making love, Drink

“One of the oddest things in life, as we all know, is the way that when you have heard a thing mentioned, within twenty-four hours you nearly always come across it again.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

Life, Way

“Ages fourteen to eighteen, a girl needs something to kill all that time, that endless itchy waiting, every hour, every day for something — anything — to begin.”

Megan Abbott book Dare Me

Source: Dare Me

Age, Girl, Time, Waiting

“Everything man does today to be efficient, to fill the hour? It does not satisfy. It only makes him hungry to do more. Man wants to own his existence. But no one owns time. When you are measuring life, you are not living it.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The Time Keeper

Life, Time

“And I began to let him go. Hour by hour. Days into months. It was a physical sensation, like letting out the string of a kite. Except that the string was coming from my center.”

Augusten Burroughs book You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas

Source: You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas

“Reflection must be reserved for solitary hours; whenever she was alone, she gave way to it as the greatest relief; and not a day went by without a solitary walk, in which she might indulge in all the delight of unpleasant recollections.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Way

“Myrna could spend happy hours browsing bookcases. She felt if she could just get a good look at a person’s bookcase and their grocery cart, she’d pretty much know who they were.”

Louise Penny book Still Life

Source: Still Life

Happiness, Personality

“To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

Life, World, Soul, Understanding

“I spend most of my waking hours confronting and destroying things that I fear. A thousand-year-old master vampire was a tall order, but a girl's got to have a goal.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Guilty Pleasures

Source: Guilty Pleasures

Fear, Girl

“When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night,
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.”

Flann O'Brien book At Swim-Two-Birds

Source: At Swim-Two-Birds

Life, Night

“A man that is young in years may be old in hours if he have lost no time.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

Time

“If I could, I would stop the passage of time. But hour follows on hour, minute on minute, each second robbing me of a morsel of myself for the nothing of tomorrow. I shall never experience this moment again.”

Guy De Maupassant (1850–1893) French writer

Time

“Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight to avoid this?”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Variant: Don't you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this?
Source: Either/Or, Part I

Life, Thinking

“Less than forty-eight hours until G-Day, when Gaea the Princess of Potty Sludge would awaken in all her dirt-faced glory.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Princess

“If you don't have answers to your problems after a four-hour run, you ain't getting them.”

Christopher McDougall (1962) American journalist and writer

Source: Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

Problem

“There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.”

Hunter S. Thompson book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Source: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Sense, Universe, Madness

“A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.”

P.G. Wodehouse book The Adventures of Sally

Source: The Adventures of Sally (1922)

Life, Parting

“There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices; after philosophy there must be action; the strong hand finishes what the idea has sketched.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Idea, Strong

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

Source: The Writing Life

“We spend precious hours fearing the inevitable. It would be wise to use that time adoring our families, cherishing our friends and living our lives.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Fear, Family, Time

“in this short life
that only lasts ah hour
how much-how little-is
within our power.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Life

“If I had but an hour of love, if that be all that is given me, an hour of love upon this earth, I would give my love to thee.”

Alice Sebold book The Lovely Bones

Source: The Lovely Bones

Love, Cute, Romantic, For Her

“I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond.”

Patti Smith M Train

Source: M Train

World, Light

“Healthy striving is about striving for internal goals, and wanting to be our best selves. Perfectionism is not motivated internally. Perfectionism is about what people will think. And you do not see effective leaders in corporations sitting on an email for three hours to make sure it’s worded just perfectly. You don’t. They have work to get done.. You don’t see elite athletes letting themselves be discouraged by a bad workout or a single bad performance. It happens all the time. They’re accustomed to winning, they’re accustomed to losing. Once perfectionism becomes the goal, they’re out of the sport.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Washington Post, October 2012 http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/exhaustion-is-not-a-status-symbol/2012/10/02/19d27aa8-0cba-11e2-bb5e-492c0d30bff6_story_2.html Source: The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

People, Motivation, Thinking, Sport

“I spent uncounted hours sitting at the bow looking at the water and the sky, studying each wave, different from the last, seeing how it caught the light, the air, the wind; watching patterns, the sweep of it all, and letting it take me.
The sea.”

Gary Paulsen (1939) American writer and musher

Source: Caught by the Sea

Study, Light, Water, Sea

“She whispered, 'C'etait la Verite?' Was that Verity? Or perhaps she just meant, Was that the truth? Was it true? Did any of it really happen? Were the last three hours real? 'Yes,' I whispered back. 'Oui. C'etait la verite.”

Elizabeth Wein book Code Name Verity

Source: Code Name Verity

Truth

“You'd tell me if we were getting married, wouldn't you? I mean, you wouldn't just appear on my doorstep one day and say we were due at the church in an hour.”

Janet Evanovich book Seven Up

Source: Seven Up

Appearance

“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Speech in the House of Commons, June 18, 1940 "War Situation" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1940/jun/18/war-situation#column_60. The Second World War (1939–1945) Source: Never Give In!: The Best of Winston Churchill's Speeches Context: Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us now. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.

Men

“I should go to Paris and jump off of the Eiffel Tower. If I took the Concorde, I could be dead three hours earlier.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Dead

“It's all in the view. That's what I mean about forever, too. For any one of us our forever could end in an hour, or a hundred years from now. You never know for sure, so you'd better make every second count.”

Sarah Dessen book The Truth About Forever

Source: The Truth About Forever

“Yeah, well, I’ll be glad to birth it if it means I can name him something normal. (Zarek)
Yeah, yeah. This from a man who whines like a two-year-old when he stubs his toe. I’d like to see you survive ten hours of childbirth. (Astrid)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Dream Warrior

Birth

“It is the hour of pearl—the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.”

John Steinbeck book Cannery Row

Source: Cannery Row

Time, Night

“Please," she whispered as she opened the book, "please get me out of here just for an hour or so, please take me far, far away”

Cornelia Funke Inkheart trilogy

Source: Inkheart

Books

“You sit at a desk twelve hours a day and you have nothing to show for it except some numbers that won't exist or be remembered in a week. You're leaving no evidence you lived. There's no proof.”

Dave Eggers book The Circle

Source: The Circle

“I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.”

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic

Men, Dreams, Flowers, Tear

“My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Volume II [Tauchnitz, 1860] ( p. 226 https://books.google.com/books?id=xAm2X8YfpJIC&pg=PA226) Also in The Secret Ingredient by Laura Schaefer [Simon & Schuster, 2012, ISBN 1-442-41960-1] ( p. 169 https://books.google.com/books?id=o1ctj37QuikC&pg=PA169) Source: The Woman in White (1859)

Waiting, Past, Tea