The Hours quotes

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

View Quote 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 me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then.

View Quote Clarissa: Just to let you know I am making the crab thing. Not that I imagine it makes any difference to you.
Richard: Of course it makes a difference. I love the crab thing.

View Quote Clarissa: I'm having a party. My friend Richard has won the Carrouthers.
Florist: Well that's just terrific! If I knew what it was.

View Quote Would you be angry if I died?

View Quote Julia: You can't see that? You can't see that Louis Waters is weird?
Clarissa: I can see that he's sad.
Julia: Well. All your friends are sad.

View Quote Kitty: Oh, you're reading a book?
Laura: Yeah.
Kitty: What's this one about?
Laura: 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.

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

View Quote Richard: Who is this party for?
Clarissa: What are you asking, what are you trying to say?
Richard: I'm not trying to say anything. I think I'm staying alive just to satisfy you.

View Quote 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.

View Quote 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.

View Quote 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.

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

View Quote Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. It's contrast.

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