Quotes from Michael Cunningham, The Hours

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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