Top 100 Michael Cunningham Quotes
#1. As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.
Michael Cunningham
#2. She wants to have baked a cake that banishes sorrow, even if only for a little while.
Michael Cunningham
#3. This, Barrett Meeks, is your work. You witness, and compile. You persevere.
Michael Cunningham
#4. What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. And there it is ... It was death. I chose life.
Michael Cunningham
#5. Parents are the mystified criminals, blinking in the docks, making it all the worse for themselves with every word they utter.
Michael Cunningham
#6. He needs a looser association. He needs something that implies a man who wants the ice shard to remain in his chest, who's learned to love the sensation of being pierced.
Michael Cunningham
#7. 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.
Michael Cunningham
#9. She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric.
Michael Cunningham
#10. One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
Michael Cunningham
#11. I know a conquistador when I see one. I know all about making a splash. It isn't hard. If you shout loud enough, for long enough, a crowd will gather to see what all the noise is about. It's the nature of crowds. They don't stay long, unless you give them reason.
Michael Cunningham
#12. Have faith that you will be here, recognizable to yourself, again tomorrow.
Michael Cunningham
#13. I think of the people who commit these acts as children. They're in their 20s, but like certain children, they have been told only one story, over and over. Like most children, they believe in an easily identifiable good and evil, and like most children, they are capable of unthinkable cruelty.
Michael Cunningham
#14. She is an attractive, robust, fleshy, large-headed woman several years younger than Laura (it seems that every one, suddenly, is at least slightly younger than she).
Michael Cunningham
#15. This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.
Michael Cunningham
#16. It seems that she can survive, she can prosper, if she has London around her.
Michael Cunningham
#17. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.
Michael Cunningham
#18. Remember, Peter: you are some hybrid of friend and hired help. You have latitude, but you can't get uppity.
Michael Cunningham
#19. She will remain sane and she will live as she was meant to live, richly and deeply, among others of her kind, in full possession and command of her gifts.
Michael Cunningham
#21. If you've really loved a book, or a movie for that matter, really loved it, what you want is that same book again, but as if you've never read it. And when you get something unfamiliar, you feel betrayed.
Michael Cunningham
#22. Virginia Woolf came along in the early part of the century and essentially said through her writing, yes, big books can be written about the traditional big subjects. There is war. There is the search for God. These are all very important things.
Michael Cunningham
#23. People are more than you think they are. And they're less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.
Michael Cunningham
#24. It's hardly ever the destination we've been anticipating, is it? Our hopes may seem unrealized, but we were in all likelihood hoping for the wrong thing. Where did we - the species, that is - pick up that strange and perverse habit?
Michael Cunningham
#25. ... Andrew, who, in the wry of certain gods, couldn't care less about human squabblings; who literally fails to understand them. There are all these fruits, there's water and sky, there's enough for everyone, what could you possibly have to argue about?
Michael Cunningham
#26. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
Michael Cunningham
#27. But then again, in addition to paper and cardboard ... a little illuminated box, that contains thousands and thousands of stories? People aren't fascinated by that? Really?
Michael Cunningham
#28. I see myself..in those pages as she goes back and forth, enjoying simply enjoying the beauties of the moments then chastising herself for having 'no edge' being simple and worse, harmless.
Michael Cunningham
#29. I was not beautiful, but I believed I had the possibility of beauty in me.
Michael Cunningham
#30. The book worm, the foreign-looking one with the dark, close set eyes an the Roman nose, who had never been sought after or cherished; who had always been left alone, to read.
Michael Cunningham
#34. These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody's little display of genius.
Michael Cunningham
#35. Zoe loved Trancas's mother. She respected her exhausted and ironic hope for rebirth.
Michael Cunningham
#36. Venture too far for love ... and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port.
Michael Cunningham
#37. They hope they'll learn to be happier together. They also yearn, sometimes, for the point at which misery becomes so profound as to leave them no alternative.
Michael Cunningham
#38. Here's the sting of livingness. He's back after his nightly voyage of sleep, all clarity and purpose; he's renewed his citizenship in the world of people who strive and connect, people who mean business, people who burn and want, who remember everything, who walk lucid and unafraid.
Michael Cunningham
#39. But magic is sometimes all about knowing where the secret door is, and how to open it. With that, you're gone
Michael Cunningham
#40. Her cake is a failure, but she is loved anyway. She is loved, she thinks, in more or less the way the gifts will be appreciated: because they have been given with good intentions , because they exist, because they are part of a world in which one wants what one gets.
Michael Cunningham
#41. God save us from people who think they're smarter than they actually are.
Michael Cunningham
#42. Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book.
Michael Cunningham
#43. One of the troubles with love is, you can't talk about it without feeling like you keep cueing old songs.
Michael Cunningham
#44. Mizzy has, again, wandered into the garden, like a child who feels no fealty to adult conversation.
Michael Cunningham
#45. 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.
Michael Cunningham
#47. She'd never been religious. She hadn't allowed grief to send her crawling to the church.
Michael Cunningham
#48. And yet, it gives Peter nothing. Not now. Not today. Not when he needs ... more. More than this well-executed idea. More than the shark in the tank meant to frighten, more than the guy on the street meant to say something pithy about celebrity. More than this.
Michael Cunningham
#49. All over China, parents tell their children to stop complaining and to finish their quadratic equations and trigonometric functions because there are sixty-five million American kids going to bed with no math at all.
Michael Cunningham
#50. She is, above all else, tired; she wants more than anything to return to her bed and her book. The world, this world, feels suddenly stunned and stunted, far from everything.
Michael Cunningham
#51. She will never mention to Leonard that she'd planned on fleeing, even for a few hours. As if he were the one in need of care and comfort
as if he were the one in danger.
Michael Cunningham
#52. His indiscriminate love feels entirely serious to her, as if everything in the world is part of a vast, inscrutable intention and everything in the world has its own secret name, a name that cannot be conveyed in language but is simply the sight and feel of the thing itself.
Michael Cunningham
#54. I used to want to be a cheerleader," I told them. "Before I decided to just go to hell.
Michael Cunningham
#55. You don't necessarily meet a lot of people in this world. Not when you let yourself get distracted by music and the passing of hours.
Michael Cunningham
#59. I had blundered again, obscurely, and rather than go on worrying over my behavior, I decided to just give in and dislike Alice.
Michael Cunningham
#60. He's filled with a sense of childish release, the old feeling that because you are sick, all your trials and obligations have been suspended.
Michael Cunningham
#62. He makes her think sometimes of a mouse singing amorous ballads under the window of a giantess.
Michael Cunningham
#63. Right now she is reading Virginia Woolf, all of Virginia Woolf, book by book-She is fascinated by the idea of a woman like that, a woman of such brilliance, such strangeness, such immeasurable sorrow; a woman who had genius but still filled her pocket with a stone and waded out into a river.
Michael Cunningham
#64. Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.
Michael Cunningham
#65. He felt himself entering a moment so real he could only run toward it, shouting.
Michael Cunningham
#67. He moved in a world of chaos of self, fearful and astonished to be here, right here, alive in a pine-paneled bedroom.
Michael Cunningham
#68. A full week of their mother's quiet fury over the fun they don't seem to be having and their father's dogged attempts to provide it ...
Michael Cunningham
#69. It's your life, quite possibly your only one. Still you find yourself having a vodka at three a.m., waiting for your pill to kick in, with time ticking through you and your own ghost already wandering among your rooms.
Michael Cunningham
#71. I've been just wondering lately, if this is, you know, it. An apartment and a steady job and some people to love. What more could I want?
Michael Cunningham
#72. It's better, really, to go out in a blaze. That's why we love Marilyn, and James Dean. We love the ones who walk right into the fire.
Michael Cunningham
#73. In heaven, Lucas would be beautiful. He'd speak a language everyone understood.
Michael Cunningham
#74. That may have been when they took their vows: We are no longer siblings, we are mates, starship survivors, a two-man crew wandering the crags and crevices of a planet that may not be inhabited by anyone but us.
Michael Cunningham
#75. Julian is bluff and sturdy, royal; he possesses a gracefully muscular, equine beauty so natural it suggests that beauty itself is a fundamental human condition and not a mutation in the general design.
Michael Cunningham
#76. What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.
Michael Cunningham
#77. Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.
Michael Cunningham
#78. I sometimes wonder how you live with such a modest sense of romance," Barrett says. "Superstition and romance are not the same thing.
Michael Cunningham
#79. Who was it who said, the worst thing you can imagine is probably what's already happening? Shrink phrase. Not untrue, though.
Michael Cunningham
#80. Isn't the universe full of gaseous elements?"
Andrew says, "Yeah, there are gases and neutrinos and this shit they call dark matter.
Michael Cunningham
#82. Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?
Michael Cunningham
#84. Catherine thought Simon was in the locket, and in heaven, and with them still. Lucas hoped she didn't expect him to be happy about having so many Simons to contend with.
Michael Cunningham
#85. She lays the book face down on her chest. Already her bedroom (no, their bedroom) feels more densely inhabited, more actual, because a character named Mrs. Dalloway is on her way to buy flowers.
Michael Cunningham
#86. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together.
Michael Cunningham
#87. We'd hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves.
Michael Cunningham
#88. He seemed to believe that from such humble, inert elements as flour, shortening, and drab little envelopes of yeast, life itself could be produced.
Michael Cunningham
#89. A celestial light appeared to Barrett Meeks in the sky over Central Park, four days after Barrett had been mauled, once again, by love.
Michael Cunningham
#90. I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.
Michael Cunningham
#91. Here is what unsayable about us: Jonathan and I are members of a team so old nobody else could join even if we wanted them to. What binds us is stronger than sex. It is stronger than love. We're related. Each of us is the other born into a different flesh.
Michael Cunningham
#92. One of the reasons ordinary people are incapable of magic is simple dearth of conviction.
Michael Cunningham
#94. I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I've learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself.
Michael Cunningham
#95. I am beginning to understand the true difference between youth and age. Young people have time to make plans and think of new ideas. Older people need their whole energy to keep up with what's already been set in motion.
Michael Cunningham
#96. There's no denying his resemblance to the Rodin bronze - the slender, effortless muscularity of youth, the extravagant nonchalance of it; that sense that beauty is in fact the natural human condition and not the rarest of mutations.
Michael Cunningham
#97. Who has more power than a child? She can be as cruel as she wants to be. He can't.
Michael Cunningham
#98. Fearlessness in the face of your own ineptitude is a useful tool to have.
Michael Cunningham
#99. She is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other word for it.
Michael Cunningham
#100. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself.
Michael Cunningham
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
