Michael Cunningham Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

If you live in certain places, in a certain way, you'd better learn to praise the small felicities. — Michael Cunningham

Sure, go ahead, simulate life, using only ink and paper. — Michael Cunningham

Women are kind of screwed, in the world, Andrew says. — Michael Cunningham

She knew she was going to have trouble believing in herself, in the room of her house, and when she glanced over at this new book on her nightstand, stacked atop the one she finished last night, she reached for it automatically, as if reading were the singular and obvious first task of the day, the only viable way to negotiate the transit from sleep to obligation. — Michael Cunningham

He wanted to tell her that he was inspired and vigilant and recklessly alone, that his body contained his unsteady heart and something else, something he felt but could not describe: porous and spiky, shifting with flecks of thought, with urge and memory; salted with brightness, flickerings of white and green and pale gold; something that loved stars because it was made of the same substance. — Michael Cunningham

Yes, she answers and does not move. She might, at this moment, be nothing but a floating intelligence; not even a brain inside a skull, just a presence that perceives, as a ghoast might. Yes, she thinks, this is probably how it must feel to be a ghost. It's a little like reading, isn't it-that same sensation of knowing people, settings, situations, without playing any particular part beyond that of the willing observer. — Michael Cunningham

I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. — Michael Cunningham

That may have been when they took their vows: We are no longer siblings, we are mates, starship survivors, a two-man crew wandering the crags and crevices of a planet that may not be inhabited by anyone but us. — Michael Cunningham

A full week of their mother's quiet fury over the fun they don't seem to be having and their father's dogged attempts to provide it ... — Michael Cunningham

We always worry about the wrong things, don't we? — Michael Cunningham

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

Heaven only knows why we love it so. — Michael Cunningham

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

And when somebody comes up to me with big hair and gobs of makeup on and says, 'Can I help you,' it's all I can do not to scream, 'Bitch, you can't even help yourself. — Michael Cunningham

Barrett is a bigger guy, not fat (not yet) but ursine, crimson of eye and lip; ginger-furred, possessed (he likes to think) of an enchanted sensual slyness, the prince transformed into wolf or lion, all slumbering large-pawed docility, awaiting, with avid yellow eyes, love's first kiss. — Michael Cunningham

You live with the threat of my extinction. I live with it too. — Michael Cunningham

He makes her think sometimes of a mouse singing amorous ballads under the window of a giantess. — Michael Cunningham

Beauty is a whore, I like money better. — Michael Cunningham

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

She pauses several treads from the bottom, listening, waiting; she is again possessed (it seems to be getting worse) by a dream-like feeling, as if she is standing in the wings, about to go onstage and perform in a play for which she is not appropriately dressed, and for which she has not adequately rehearsed. — Michael Cunningham

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

I just don't feel much interested in the lifestyles of the rich and famous. — Michael Cunningham

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

My little girl, oh, the daughter I never had. Now tell me, angel, are you fucking anybody new? — Michael Cunningham

Constantine, eight years old, was working in his father's garden and thinking about his own garden, a square of powdered granite he had staked out and combed into rows at the top of his family's land. — Michael Cunningham

Remember, Peter: you are some hybrid of friend and hired help. You have latitude, but you can't get uppity. — Michael Cunningham

There is no one there to see it. The world is doing what it always does, demonstrating itself to itself. The world has no interest in the little figures that come and go, the phantoms that worry and worship, that rake the graveled paths and erect the occasional rock garden, the bronze boy-man, the hammered cup for snow to fall into. — 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

It's remarkable, being alive. — Michael Cunningham

His 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

Beauty is a whore. I prefer money. — 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

He feels, as he sometimes does, as most people must, a presence in the room, what he can only think of as his and Rebecca's living ghosts, the amalgamation of their dreams and their breathing, their smells. He does not believe in ghosts, but he believes in ... something. Something viable, something living, that's surprised when he wakes at this hour, that's neither glad nor sorry to see him awake but that recognizes the fact, because it has been interrupted in its nocturnal inchoate musings. — Michael Cunningham

Mizzy has wandered into the garden. Carole looks contemplatively at him, says, "Lovely boy."
"My wife's insanely younger brother. He's one of those kids with too much potential, if you know what I mean."
"I know exactly what you mean."
Further details would be redundant. Peter knows the Potters' story: the pretty, unstoppable daughter who's tearing through her Harvard doctorate versus the older child, the son, who has, it seems, been undone by his good fortune; who at thirty-eight is still surfing and getting stoned by way of occupations, currently in Australia. — Michael Cunningham

Parents are the mystified criminals, blinking in the docks, making it all the worse for themselves with every word they utter. — Michael Cunningham

I love movies, I love television, I love narratives of all kinds. — 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

She'll be willing to meet someone who can hold her interest for more than a few months, and that guy will teach her about domestic deepenings, the modest reliable thrill of the familiar, which as almost everyone but Liz knows has been the way of human happiness since humanity was born. — Michael Cunningham

Please, God, send me something to adore. — Michael Cunningham

He believes that a real work of art can be owned but should not be subject to capture; that it should radiate such authority, such bizarre but confident beauty (or unbeauty) that it can't be undone by even the most ludicrous sofas or side tables. A real work of art should rule the room, and the clients should call up not to complain about the art but to say that the art has helped them understand how the room is all a horrible mistake, can Peter suggest a designer to help them start over again. — Michael Cunningham

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

He seemed to believe that from such humble, inert elements as flour, shortening, and drab little envelopes of yeast, life itself could be produced. — Michael Cunningham

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

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

Who was it who said, the worst thing you can imagine is probably what's already happening? Shrink phrase. Not untrue, though. — Michael Cunningham

Sanity involves a certain measure of impersonation, not simply for the benefit of husband and servants but for the sake, first and foremost, of one's own convictions. — Michael Cunningham

I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I've learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself. — Michael Cunningham

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

There are times when you don't belong and you think you're going to kill yourself. Once I went to a hotel. Later that night I made a plan. The plan was I would leave my family when my second child was born. And that's what I did. I got up one morning, made breakfast, went to the bus stop, got on a bus. I'd left a note. I got a job in a library in Canada. It would be wonderful to say you regretted it. It would be easy. But what does it mean? What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. There it is. No-one's going to forgive me. It was death. I chose life. -Laura Brown- — Michael Cunningham

Right now she is reading Virginia Woolf, all of Virginia Woolf, book by book-She is fascinated by the idea of a woman like that, a woman of such brilliance, such strangeness, such immeasurable sorrow; a woman who had genius but still filled her pocket with a stone and waded out into a river. — Michael Cunningham

THE PILGRIM MOTHERS AND FATHERS Provincetown's first settlers were, in fact, the Pilgrims, who sailed the Mayflower into Provincetown Harbor in 1620. They spent the winter there but, finding too little fresh water, sailed that spring to Plymouth, which has gone into the history books as the Pilgrims' initial point of disembarkation. Provincetown is, understandably, not happy about this misrepresentation of the facts. — Michael Cunningham

Julian is bluff and sturdy, royal; he possesses a gracefully muscular, equine beauty so natural it suggests that beauty itself is a fundamental human condition and not a mutation in the general design. — Michael Cunningham

It's impossible to imagine, isn't it? Most men probably go through the same motions, more or less, but what's in their minds, what agitates their blood? What could be more mortifyingly personal, what veers closer to the depths, than whatever it is that makes us come? If we knew, if we could see what's in the cartoon balloons over other guy's heads as they jerk off, would we be moved, or repelled? — Michael Cunningham

He is still, at times, astonished by her. She may be the most intelligent woman in England, he thinks. Her books may be read for centuries. — 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

One of the troubles with love is, you can't talk about it without feeling like you keep cueing old songs. — Michael Cunningham

God save us from people who think they're smarter than they actually are. — Michael Cunningham

That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other. — Michael Cunningham

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

But you find - surprise - that you like this capitulation from her, this helpless acceding, from the most recent embodiment of all the girls over all the years who've given you nothing, not even a curious glance. Welcome to the darker side of love. — Michael Cunningham

Men may congratulate themselves for writing truly and passionately about the movements of nations; they may consider war and the search for God to be great literature's only subjects; but if men's standing in the world could be toppled by an ill-advised choice of hat, English literature would be dramatically changed. — Michael Cunningham

I remember one morning getting up at dawn. There was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling. And I ... I remember thinking to myself: So this is the beginning of happiness, this is where it starts. And of course there will always be more ... never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment, right then. — Michael Cunningham

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

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. — Michael Cunningham

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. — Michael Cunningham

He'll be successful, finally, this coming Sunday, at the modest ceremony to be held in the living room. It's all so clear. Tyler will write a beautiful, meaningful song. Barrett will find a love that abides, and work that matters. And Liz. Liz will tire of boys, tire of her resolution to grow into a tough, colorful old woman who lives defiantly alone. — Michael Cunningham

Which is probably one of the reasons those of us who love contemporary fiction love it as we do. We're alone with it. It arrives without references, without credentials we can trust. Givers of prizes (not to mention critics) do the best they can, but they may - they probably will - be scoffed at by their children's children. We, the living readers, whether or not we're members of juries, decide, all on our own, if we suspect ourselves to be in the presence of greatness. We're compelled to let future generations make the more final decisions, which will, in all likelihood, seem to them so clear as to produce a sense of bafflement over what was valued by their ancestors; what was garlanded and paraded, what carried to the temple on the shoulders of the wise. — Michael Cunningham

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. — Michael Cunningham

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. — Michael Cunningham

It seems that she can survive, she can prosper, if she has London around her. — Michael Cunningham

What's the most fundamental human urge?"
Barrett recites for her. "To find the perfect pair of jeans. To find the jeans that fit and flatter you so ideally that everybody, every cognizant being on the planet, will want to fuck you. — Michael Cunningham

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

Before there was any talk of a movie, people would sometimes ask me what actors I would imagine playing these characters. And the only thing I could ever say is: I have such a clear idea of these characters that they'd have to play themselves. — Michael Cunningham

a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm — Michael Cunningham

It's your life, quite possibly your only one. Still you find yourself having a vodka at three a.m., waiting for your pill to kick in, with time ticking through you and your own ghost already wandering among your rooms. — Michael Cunningham

we become the stories we tell ourselves — 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

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

Without rich people who want it done now, who would animate the free world? In theory, you want everyone to live peacefully according to their needs, along the banks of a river. In fact, you worry that you'd die of boredom there. In fact, you get a buzz from someone like Carole Potter, who keeps prize chickens and could teach a graduate course in landscaping; who maintains a staff of four (more in the summers, during High Guest Season); a handsome, slightly ridiculous husband; a beautiful daughter at Harvard and an incorrigible son doing something or other on Bondi Beach; Carole who is charming and self-deprecating and capable, if pushed, of a hostile indifference crueler than any form of rage; who reads novels and goes to movies and theater and yes, yes, bless her, buys art, serious art, about which she actually fucking knows a thing or two. — Michael Cunningham

He's filled with a sense of childish release, the old feeling that because you are sick, all your trials and obligations have been suspended. — 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

Fearlessness in the face of your own ineptitude is a useful tool to have. — Michael Cunningham

I was living my own future and my brother's lost one as well. I represented him here just as he represented me there, in some unguessable other place. His move from life to death might resemble my stepping into the kitchen - into its soft nowhere quality and foggy hum. I breathed the dark air. If I had at that moment a sense of calm kindly death while my heart beat and my lungs expanded, he might know a similar sense of life in the middle of his ongoing death. — Michael Cunningham

Beauty - the beauty Peter craves - is this, then: a human bundle of accidental grace and doom and hope. Mizzy must have hope, he must, he wouldn't shine like this if he were in true despair, and of course he's young, who in this world despairs more exquisitely than the young, it's something the old tend to forget. — Michael Cunningham

Zoe loved Trancas's mother. She respected her exhausted and ironic hope for rebirth. — Michael Cunningham

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

He moved in a world of chaos of self, fearful and astonished to be here, right here, alive in a pine-paneled bedroom. — Michael Cunningham

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

I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss. — Michael Cunningham

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

You don't necessarily meet a lot of people in this world. Not when you let yourself get distracted by music and the passing of hours. — Michael Cunningham

Visions are answers. Answers imply questions. It — Michael Cunningham

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

Oh, pride, pride. I was so wrong. It defeated me. It simply proved insurmountable. There was so much, oh, far too much for me. I mean, there's the weather, there's the water and the land, there are the animals, and the buildings, and the past and the future, there's space, there's history. There's this thread or something caught between my teeth, there's the old woman across the way, did you notice she switched the donkey and the squirrel on her windowsill? And, of course, there's time. And place. And there's you, Mrs. D. I wanted to tell part of the story of part of you. Oh, I'd love to have done that."
"Richard. You wrote a whole book."
"But everything's left out of it, almost everything. And then I just stuck on a shock ending. Oh, now, I'm not looking for sympathy, really. We want so much, don't we?"
"Yes. I suppose we do."
"You kissed me beside a pond."
"Ten thousand years ago."
"It's still happening. — Michael Cunningham