Michael Cunningham, The Hours Quotes

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

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

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

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

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

You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.

What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half.

Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.

Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?

She has failed. She wishes she didn't mind. Something, she thinks, is wrong with her.

Here, then, is the last moment of true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on opaque water.

She could, she thinks, have entered a different life. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining.