Michael Cunningham Quotes

“One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.”

“What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted something alive and shocking enough that it could be a morning in somebody's life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that.”

“She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric.”

“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.”

“Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.”

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.”

“Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.”

“we become the stories we tell ourselves”

“Perhaps, in the extravagance of youth, we give away our devotions easily and all but arbitrarily, on the mistaken assumption that we’ll always have more to give.”

“What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.”

“But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another.”

“This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.”

“There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.”

“Insomniacs know better than anyone how it would be to haunt a house.”

“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.”

“What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story?”

“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.”

“Please, God, send me something to adore.”

“Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it's Marilyn heading off to bed.”

“A celestial light appeared to Barrett Meeks in the sky over Central Park, four days after Barrett had been mauled, once again, by love. It was by no means his first romantic dropkick, but it was the first to have been conveyed by way of a five-line text, the fifth line of which was a crushingly corporate wish for good luck in the future, followed by three lowercase xxx’s.”