Hermione Hoby > Quotes

“Momsen was 15 when she joined Gossip Girl. Does she feel older and wiser at 17? "You get more insight as you get older, on everything. I kind of woke up one morning and I was like, 'Oh, I see what's happening, I get everything.'"

Then she stops abruptly. So what is it she gets exactly? "Well, I kind of woke up and was like, 'Oh, I get it, I'm a product.'" Which might be the saddest words ever to pass a 17-year-old girl's lips. But, with typical Momsen nonchalance, they're delivered with a shrug.”
― Hermione Hoby

“Speaking anything out loud ... seemed like an audacity. Lately, she could think the words fine, could sense their calm gray delineations in her mind, neutral and precise, but when she began to say them, to actually shape them into sounds to propel out of her mouth, the whole project seemed to fail.”
― Hermione Hoby, Neon in Daylight

“He didn’t tell her about the waking fucking hell that was the deterioration of a marriage, the bottomless black hole that was the love of your life turning into a stranger, the heartbreak, mind-break, body-break, everything-break of a breakup of that kind, that all that agony was far more intense, dense, and crushingly huge an experience than was the love that had preceded it. Unrequited love, that was a walk in the park. Or, rather, a delicious itch to scratch. Who cares if the itch worsens the more you scratch? Keep on scratching, deliciously.”
― Hermione Hoby, Neon in Daylight

“The tapping of her foot seemed less like agitation and more like an expression of optimism and energy, a hunger for things. Its regularity seemed almost practical, as though this foot pedaled the engine that powered the girl’s world and she was simply keeping it going, pushing it forward, an impatient maintenance.”
― Hermione Hoby, Neon in Daylight

“It's never love, as soon as you feel the next love. Because isn't that a prerequisite of the condition? That you tell yourself everything that came before wasn't really it.”
― Hermione Hoby, Neon in Daylight

“Byron was among the absent; it was rumored he was suffering from gout. (I couldn’t believe this was a thing people still got in 2017.)”
― Hermione Hoby, Virtue

“She was forty-nine but had the hard and girlish build of a teenage volleyball captain, lithe and vigorous with sinewy arms made for wielding things.”
― Hermione Hoby, Virtue

“There he is, staring up at her geraniumed windowsills back in the inconceivable year (literally, for me—I was not yet conceived) of 1991,”
― Hermione Hoby, Virtue

“being alone might feel sort of heroic, or at least dignified. Or at least grown-up. It wasn’t any of these. It was the weekend before Thanksgiving, the end of the”
― Hermione Hoby, Virtue

“Today when I’m in the room with my students, I love it when one of them mispronounces a word. It tells me they’re a reader, a specimen of one of the planet’s more endangered species. Clearly they’ve only ever read the word, never heard it, and here they are, taking it out of the soundless privacy of their mind and into speech.”
― Hermione Hoby, Virtue

“A tart shiver of pleasure ran through her at the memory. The dare, the doing it, the mark it made.”
― Hermione Hoby, Neon in Daylight

“She narrowed her eyes. Zara could always tell when I or anyone else was spouting phatic rubbish, just more words on the trash heap of human speech.”
― Hermione Hoby, Virtue

“no hog roast and champagne for sixty with friends camping out across the property and committing audible adultery in tents. Just a small dinner at the table in the garden under the trees.”
― Hermione Hoby, Virtue

“In fact, the magazine actually was partly funded for decades by a batty old viscountess aging away in an actual castle in the actual Scottish Highlands, as well as, it was said, the CIA.”
― Hermione Hoby, Virtue

“No one would ever write a magazine profile about me. The only epic thing about me was my student debt.”
― Hermione Hoby, Virtue

“I wanted badly to be good; I wanted desperately to be liked. It was easy to confuse the two.”
― Hermione Hoby, Virtue

“No man with an iPhone has ever taken a good photograph of the moon.”
― Hermione Hoby, Virtue

“Being told what you were was irresistible, albeit in a slightly sickening way. She was feeling, yes, a little sick.”
― Hermione Hoby, Neon in Daylight

“gave Twitter a cursory scroll, as if the news mattered as little as some blockbuster movie from my childhood playing on mute on a TV above a bar.”
― Hermione Hoby, Virtue

“And then there was Zara, who was said to have turned down Princeton and Harvard and gone to Brown instead, as if this were a great act of principled sacrifice.”
― Hermione Hoby, Virtue

“So much you could forget — the sequence of your own life. Maybe humans weren't meant to live this long, maybe brains couldn't retain this much life, maybe the natural way of things was to die at thirty, when you could still remember it all, or most of it.”
― Hermione Hoby, Neon in Daylight

“The hoary scrum of organ music drenched us in sounds somehow brown and maroon and purple as we the interns in a self-conscious line took our seats in a pew in the back.”
― Hermione Hoby, Virtue

“Masculinity was toxic and, masochists, we turned our gazes to our screens to watch the president confirm it daily.”
― Hermione Hoby, Virtue

“walked around cowed by my own cis-white-maleness while wondering if it might somehow benefit me and the world to nurture whatever queerness I had in me.”
― Hermione Hoby, Virtue