Michael Cunningham Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

He's one of those smart, drifty young people who, after certain deliberations, decides he wants to do Something in the Arts but won't, possibly can't, think in terms of an actual job; who seems to imagine that youth and brains and willingness will simply summon an occupation, the precise and perfect nature of which will reveal itself in its own time.

Michael Cunningham
What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story?

Michael Cunningham
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.

Michael Cunningham
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
Like the morning you walked out of that old house, when you were eighteen and I was, well, I had just turned nineteen, hadn't I? I was a nineteen-year-old and I was in love with Louis and I was in love with you, and I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful as the sight of you walking out a glass door in the early morning, still sleepy, in your underwear. Isn't it strange?

Michael Cunningham
He insists on a version of you that is funnier, stranger, more eccentric and prfound thatn you suspect yourself to be—capable of doing more good and more harm in the world than you've ever imagined—it is all but impossible not to believe, at least in his presence and a while after you've left him, that he alone sees through your essence, weighs your true qualities... and appreciates you more fully than anyone else ever has.

Michael Cunningham
This 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
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.

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

Michael Cunningham