Top 100 Michael Cunningham Quotes
#1. I was influenced by big, strong voices - writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Jane Bowles; gay writers like Ed White, Michael Cunningham, Allen Hollinghurst; and contemporary lesbian writers, like Dorothy Allison.
Stacey D'Erasmo
#2. As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.
Michael Cunningham
#3. You." "Likewise." They shake hands, head back to the elevator. Groff
Michael Cunningham
#4. On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.
Michael Cunningham
#5. A stray fact: insects are not drawn to candle flames, they are drawn to the light on the far side of the flame, they go into the flame and sizzle to nothingness because they're so eager to get to the light on the other side.
Michael Cunningham
#7. She wants to have baked a cake that banishes sorrow, even if only for a little while.
Michael Cunningham
#10. This, Barrett Meeks, is your work. You witness, and compile. You persevere.
Michael Cunningham
#11. 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
#12. That summer when she was eighteen, it seemed anything could happen, anything at all.
Michael Cunningham
#13. Parents are the mystified criminals, blinking in the docks, making it all the worse for themselves with every word they utter.
Michael Cunningham
#14. 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
#15. Cunningham himself said in an interview in Poz that he couldn't help noticing that as soon as he wrote a novel without a blowjob, they gave him the Pulitzer Prize.
Christopher Bram
#16. 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
#19. 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.
Michael Cunningham
#21. She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric.
Michael Cunningham
#22. One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
Michael Cunningham
#23. You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.
Michael Cunningham
#24. A certain slightly cruel disregard for the feelings of living people is simply part of the package. I think a writer, if he's any good, is not an entirely benign entity in the world.
Michael Cunningham
#25. Barrett strokes one of the chair's slick, bile-green arms. "You can get attached to just about anything, can't you?" he says.
Michael Cunningham
#26. 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
#27. Have faith that you will be here, recognizable to yourself, again tomorrow.
Michael Cunningham
#28. 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
#29. If you live in certain places, in a certain way, you'd better learn to praise the small felicities.
Michael Cunningham
#30. I'm sure there are people who are content to run errands and report for work on time and wait, with an enlivening eagerness, for the lunch bell. I wish them well. They have, however, never been the subjects of novels, and in all likelihood, will never be.
Michael Cunningham
#31. 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
#32. This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.
Michael Cunningham
#33. Clarissa, sane Clarissa-exultant, ordinary Clarissa- will go on, loving London, loving her life of ordinary pleasure, and someone else, a deranged poet, a visionary, will be the one to die.
Michael Cunningham
#34. It seems that she can survive, she can prosper, if she has London around her.
Michael Cunningham
#35. 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
#36. Our hopes may seem unrealized, but we were in all likelihood hoping for the wrong thing.
Michael Cunningham
#38. Remember, Peter: you are some hybrid of friend and hired help. You have latitude, but you can't get uppity.
Michael Cunningham
#39. He knows about damage the way a woman does. He knows, the way a woman knows, how to carry on as if nothing's wrong.
Michael Cunningham
#40. 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
#42. 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
#43. I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.
Michael Cunningham
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half.
Michael Cunningham
#47. Most of us are safe. If you're not a delirious dream the gods are having, if your beauty doesn't trouble the constellations, nobody's going to cast a spell on you.
Michael Cunningham
#48. 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
#49. I know, speaking for myself, no matter what I'm able to do, no matter what book comes out and ends up on paper, I always had something bigger and grander in my head.
Michael Cunningham
#50. ... 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
#51. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.
Michael Cunningham
#52. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
Michael Cunningham
#53. Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.
Michael Cunningham
#54. 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
#56. That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other.
Michael Cunningham
#57. 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
#59. I was not beautiful, but I believed I had the possibility of beauty in me.
Michael Cunningham
#60. It was either the wind or the spirit of the house itself, briefly unsettled by our nocturnal absence but to old to be surprised by the errands born from the gap between what we can imagine and what we can in fact create.
Michael Cunningham
#61. What he remembers with perfect clarity is sitting on a train headed for Madrid, feeling the sort of happiness he imagines spirits might feel, freed of their earthly bodies but still possessed of their essential selves.
Michael Cunningham
#62. Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write.
Michael Cunningham
#63. 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
#66. I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end. But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
Michael Cunningham
#68. 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
#69. We worship numberless gods or idols, but we all need to be the grandest possible versions of ourselves, we need to walk across the face of the earth with as much grace and beauty as we can muster before we're wrapped in our winding sheets, and returned.
Michael Cunningham
#70. Love, it seems, arrives not only unannounced, but so accidentally, so randomly, as to make you wonder why you, why anyone, believes even fleetingly in laws of cause and effect
Michael Cunningham
#71. Here, then, is the last moment of true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on opaque water.
Michael Cunningham
#72. Zoe loved Trancas's mother. She respected her exhausted and ironic hope for rebirth.
Michael Cunningham
#73. The secret of flight is this
you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.
Michael Cunningham
#74. It's the country that would have him, since he lacked the necessary papers for more promising places.
Michael Cunningham
#75. 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
#76. Oh, all you immigrants and visionaries, what do you hope to find here, who do you hope to become?
Michael Cunningham
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. But magic is sometimes all about knowing where the secret door is, and how to open it. With that, you're gone
Michael Cunningham
#80. 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
#81. God save us from people who think they're smarter than they actually are.
Michael Cunningham
#82. 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
#83. I just don't feel much interested in the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
Michael Cunningham
#84. One of the troubles with love is, you can't talk about it without feeling like you keep cueing old songs.
Michael Cunningham
#85. Mizzy has, again, wandered into the garden, like a child who feels no fealty to adult conversation.
Michael Cunningham
#86. I suppose at heart it was the haircut that did it; that exploded the ordinary order of things and showed me the possibilities that had been there all along, hidden among the patterns in the wallpaper. In a different age, we used to take acid for more or less the same reason.
Michael Cunningham
#87. Insomniacs know better than anyone how it would be to haunt a house.
Michael Cunningham
#88. Barrett lingers awhile. He's not eager to relinquish the strange pleasure of sitting in the green chair, surrounded by the ever-diminishing offerings that had, just yesterday, been daily articles, watching the apartment disappear, piece by piece.
Michael Cunningham
#89. The art we produce lives in queasy balance with the art we can imagine the art the room expects.
Michael Cunningham
#90. 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
#92. The implication of this particular tale is: Trust strangers. Believe in magic.
Michael Cunningham
#93. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.
Michael Cunningham
#94. She'd never been religious. She hadn't allowed grief to send her crawling to the church.
Michael Cunningham
#95. Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it's Marilyn heading off to bed.
Michael Cunningham
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear.
Michael Cunningham
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