All Quotes

"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."

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard."

"Dear Leonard. To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard. Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours."

"I'm gonna make a cake. That's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna make the cake for daddy's birthday."

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

"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."

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

"Why is everything wrong?"

"When I'm with him I feel... Yes, I am living. And when I'm not with him... Yes, everything does seem sort of silly."

"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 wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then."

"Oh, Mrs. Dalloway... Always giving parties to cover the silence."

"I wanted to be a writer, that's all. I wanted to write about it all. Everything that happens in a moment. The way the flowers looked when you carried them in your arms. This towel, how it smells, how it feels, this thread. All our feelings, yours and mine. The history of it, who we once were. Everything in the world. Everything all mixed up, like it's all mixed up now. And I failed. I failed. No matter what you start with it ends up being so much less. Sheer fucking pride and stupidity."

"Would you be angry if I died?"

"Just wait till I die. Then you'll have to think of yourself. How are you going to like that?"

"I had this fantastic notion. I took the Xanax and the Ritalin together. It had never occurred to me!"

"I've stayed alive for you. But now you have to let me go."

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

"Sally: Why do I always have to sit next to the exes? Is this some kind of a hint, sweetheart? And anyway, shouldn't the exes have a table of their own where they can all ex together in ex-quisite agony?"

"Kitty: All my life I could do everything. I could do anything, really. Except the one thing I wanted."

"Kitty: I don't think you can call yourself a woman until you're a mother."

"Louis: The day I left him I got on a train and made my way across Europe. I felt free for the first time in years."

"Vanessa: Your aunt is a very lucky woman, Angelica. She has two lives. She has the life she is leading and also the books she is writing."

"Julia: They're all here, aren't they? All the ghosts... All the ghosts are assembling for the party!"

"Dan: The thought of this life, that's what kept me going. I had an idea of our happiness."

"We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds & expectations, to burst open & give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so... There she is with another hour before her."

"Nicole Kidman - Virginia Woolf"

"Julianne Moore - Laura Brown"

"Meryl Streep - Clarissa Vaughan"

"Ed Harris - Richard Brown"

"A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox."

"Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process."

"A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation."

"The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; ... the wise does neither."

"You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration."

"The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse."

"Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around."

"Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness."

"Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain."

"The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement."

"Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession."

"Just as dyed hair makes older men less attractive, it is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant."

"When conflicted between two choices, take neither."

"For the robust, an error is information."

"It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own."

"Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant."

"For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight."

"We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude."

"The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him."

"The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments."

"Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand."