Michael Cunningham Quotes
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How we dress is, as far as I can tell, the only inescapably public choice that we have. People don't need to know what you eat, people don't need to know who you have sex with. But there's no escaping what you wear and the fact that you've chosen it. Even if you insist that you don't care about fashion, that's your statement. It's really one realm of life where you are forced to make your own statement.
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Maybe it’s not, in the end, the virtues of others that so wrenches our hearts as it is the sense of almost unbearably poignant recognition when we see them at their most base, in their sorrow and gluttony and foolishness. You need the virtues, too—some sort of virtues—but we don’t care about Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina or Raskolnikov because they’re good. We care about them because they’re not admirable, because they’re us, and because great writers have forgiven them for it.
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You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire - that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realise, no, it's just this book.
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There is just this for consolation: an hour here or there, when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined , though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so.
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She is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other word for it.
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we become the stories we tell ourselves
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a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm
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I seem to produce a novel approximately once every three years.
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That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other.
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She thinks how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in gestures and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.
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I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first draft. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that closely resembles the sentence I first set down. I just find that I have to keep zapping and zapping the English language until it starts to behave in some way that vaguely matches my intentions.
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Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.
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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.
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Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.
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Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?
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Man," he said, "I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want." "What do we want?" I asked blurrily. "Aw, man, you know," he said. "We just want, well, the same things these people wanted." "What was that?" He shrugged. "To live, I guess," he said.
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I just don't feel much interested in the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
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I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
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I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it's Marilyn heading off to bed.
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I feel like there's something terrible and wonderful and amazing that's just beyond my grasp. I have dreams about it. I do dream, by the way. It hovers over me at odd moments. And then it's gone. I feel like I'm always on the brink of something that never arrives. I want to either have it or be free of it.
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The vestibule door opens onto a June morning so fine and scrubbed Classira pauses at the threshold as she would at the edge of a pool, watching the turquoise water lapping at the tiles, the liquid nets of sun wavering in the blue depths. As if standing at the edge of a pool she delays for a moment the plunge, the quick membrane of chill, the plain shock of immersion.
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Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.
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The kiss was innocent--innocent enough--but it was also full of something not unlike what Virginia wants from London, from life; it was full of a love complex and ravenous, ancient, neither this nor that. It will serve as this afternoon's manifestation of the central mystery itself, the elusive brightness that shines from the edges of certain dreams; the brightness which, when we awaken, is already fading from our minds, and which we rise in the hope of finding, perhaps today, this new day in which anything might happen, anything at all.
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If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences, though it runs like veins of brilliant metal through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance
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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.
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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.
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