Virtue Quotes

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

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

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

“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