Quotes from book

The Hours

“What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted something alive and shocking enough that it could be a morning in somebody's life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that.”

“She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric.”

“Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.”

“What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.”

“She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.”

“What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. And there it is… It was death. I chose life.”

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.”

“There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.”

“She will remain sane and she will live as she was meant to live, richly and deeply, among others of her kind, in full possession and command of her gifts.”

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

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

“Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.”

“There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.”

“These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody's little display of genius.”

“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.”