Michael Cunningham Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

That summer when she was eighteen, it seemed anything could happen, anything at all.

Michael Cunningham
The secret of flight is this — you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.

Michael Cunningham
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
Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.

Michael Cunningham
She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric.

Michael Cunningham
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
Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself.

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

Michael Cunningham
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

Michael Cunningham
I don't have any regrets, really, except that one. I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.

Michael Cunningham
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.

Michael Cunningham
There's 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.

Michael Cunningham
He felt himself entering a moment so real he could only run toward it, shouting.

Michael Cunningham
It's the city's crush and heave that move you; its intricacy; its endless life. You know the story about Manhattan as a wilderness purchased for strings of beads, but you find it impossible not to believe that it has always been a city; that if you dug beneath it you would find the ruins of another, older city, and then another and another.

Michael Cunningham
Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.

Michael Cunningham
It's the world, you live in it, even if some boy has made a fool of you.

Michael Cunningham
Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.

Michael Cunningham
The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.

Michael Cunningham
Remember, how often the great art of the past didn't look great at first, how often it didn't look like art at all; how much easier it is, decades or centuries later, to adore it, not only because it is, in fact, great but because it's still here; because the inevitable little errors and infelicities tend to recede in an object that's survived the War of 1812, the eruption of Krakatoa, the rise and fall of Nazism.

Michael Cunningham
Oh, all you immigrants and visionaries, what do you hope to find here, who do you hope to become?

Michael Cunningham
Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?

Michael Cunningham
You grow weary of being treated as the enemy simply because you are not young anymore; because you dress unexceptionally.

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

Michael Cunningham
What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me & incredibly good. I want to say that - everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

Michael Cunningham
I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.

Michael Cunningham
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
She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

Michael Cunningham
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
Insomniacs know better than anyone how it would be to haunt a house.

Michael Cunningham
Any other vexations to report?" he asks. "I love the word 'vexations.'" "It's the 'x.' Nice to jump off a 'v' and bite into an 'x' like that." "Just the usual ones," she says. "How was the weekend?" "Vexing. Not really, I just wanted to say it. You?

Michael Cunningham