Michael Cunningham quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Michael Cunningham on Wise Famous Quotes.

She'd never been religious. She hadn't allowed grief to send her crawling to the church.

She has failed. She wishes she didn't mind. Something, she thinks, is wrong with her.

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

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

I've been just wondering lately, if this is, you know, it. An apartment and a steady job and some people to love. What more could I want?

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

Our hopes may seem unrealized, but we were in all likelihood hoping for the wrong thing.

Welcome to the darker side of love.

A writer should always feel like he's in over his head

The point of sex is...
Sex doesn't have a point.

The art we produce lives in queasy balance with the art we can imagine the art the room expects.

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

In heaven, Lucas would be beautiful. He'd speak a language everyone understood.

There's no comfort, it seems, in the world of objects.

You can't find peace by avoiding life.

Beauty is a whore, I like money better.

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

Heaven only knows why we love it so.

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

I had blundered again, obscurely, and rather than go on worrying over my behavior, I decided to just give in and dislike Alice.

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

Have faith that you will be here, recognizable to yourself, again tomorrow.

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

It is the Morocco of America, the New Orleans of the north.

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

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.

Barrett strokes one of the chair's slick, bile-green arms. "You can get attached to just about anything, can't you?" he says.

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

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

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

A celestial light appeared to Barrett Meeks in the sky over Central Park, four days after Barrett had been mauled, once again, by love.

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.

we become the stories we tell ourselves

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

Most of us can be counted on to manage our own undoings.

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

I know you. I've seen it. And, knowing all, I release you.

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

She is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other word for it.

Accept that, like many men, you have a streak of the homoerotic in you. Why would you, why would anyone, want to be that straight?

This, Barrett Meeks, is your work. You witness, and compile. You persevere.

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

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

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 ...

You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.

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

Please, God, send me something to adore.

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

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

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end. But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

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

You have failed in the most base and human of ways
you have not imagined the lives of others.

What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half.

End of story. 'Happily ever after' fell on everyone like a guillotine's blade.

I'm just a child who's learned to impersonate an adult.

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

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

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.

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

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

One of the reasons ordinary people are incapable of magic is simple dearth of conviction.

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

Isn't the universe full of gaseous elements?"
Andrew says, "Yeah, there are gases and neutrinos and this shit they call dark matter.

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.

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

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

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

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

I sometimes wonder how you live with such a modest sense of romance," Barrett says. "Superstition and romance are not the same thing.

People are more than you think they are. And they're less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.

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

As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.

Visions are answers. Answers imply questions. It

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

It's remarkable, being alive.

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.

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

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

I was not beautiful, but I believed I had the possibility of beauty in me.

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

But magic is sometimes all about knowing where the secret door is, and how to open it. With that, you're gone

You don't have to matter any more than you do right now.

She wants to have baked a cake that banishes sorrow, even if only for a little while.

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

This is a Southern gift, isn't it - tremendous self-regard diluted with humor and modesty. That's what they mean by Southern charm, right?

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.

Who has more power than a child? She can be as cruel as she wants to be. He can't.

I think pretty much everybody who says he needs money really and truly needs money.

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

What did Shakespeare say? Or little lives are rounded with a sleep.

Beauty is a whore. I prefer money.

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

Youth is the only sexy tragedy.

Here, then, is the last moment of true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on opaque water.

I seem to produce a novel approximately once every three years.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.

I used to want to be a cheerleader," I told them. "Before I decided to just go to hell.

Mizzy has, again, wandered into the garden, like a child who feels no fealty to adult conversation.

He knows about damage the way a woman does. He knows, the way a woman knows, how to carry on as if nothing's wrong.

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