Cunningham Quotes

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. ~ 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

sustained high gross profit margins relative to industry peers tends to indicate durable competitive advantage. Zeroing ~ Lawrence A. Cunningham

The words you do not speak are as important to the impact you make on other people as the words you do not speak - Tom too tall Cunningham ~ Tom Cunningham

I can't tell you how much time is spent worrying about decisions that don't matter. To just be able to make a decision and see what happens is tremendously empowering, but that means you have to set up the situation such that when something does go wrong, you can fix it. ~ Ward Cunningham

Many people define beauty as skin deep, but I've found the beauty in physical and superficial changes that continue throughout the life of a woman. ~ Alyscia Cunningham

There's the appeal of the young thief who robs you, and climbs back down off your cloud. It's possible to love that boy, in a wistful and hopeless way. It's possible to love his greed and narcissism, to grant him that which is beyond your own capacities: heedlessness, cockiness, a self-devotion so pure it borders on the divine. ~ Michael Cunningham

You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard. ~ Michael Cunningham

A wiki works best where you're trying to answer a question that you can't easily pose, where there's not a natural structure that's known in advance to what you need to know. ~ Ward Cunningham

I've outgrown my childhood name, and I haven't found a new one yet."
"Ah," she cried. "Then it will be my pleasure to name you for myself. I can tell you are a colleen after my own heart, more like to me than my own daughter Findbhair. So I bestow on you the brave name of Maeve until such a time as another name shall claim you. ~ Elizabeth Cunningham

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

In previous years I was so fired up at times I made little mistakes. So I kept telling myself to be patient, relax, play like you do in practice. What I've been doing in practice will carry over into the game. ~ Randall Cunningham

He was a fantastic player, but the thing that impressed me most about Paul was his manner off the pitch. He was always very humble about his achievements and had a lot of time for the paying public and people in general. ~ Kenny Cunningham

Shelby looked over to see Andrew silently mouthing syllables to himself, as if he were part of an ecstatic rite. He grinned as he bit fricatives and tongued plosives. He was tasting English origins, mulling over words ripped from bronze-smelling hoards. Words that had slept beneath centuries of dust and small rain, sharp and bright as scale mail. Poetry had never moved her quite so much as drama. She loved the shock of colloquy, the beat and treble of words doing what they had to on stage. Andrew preferred the echo of poems buried alive. ~ Bailey 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

Do you imagine, Peter, that your Carpe Diem boots would look any less deluded to them than that guy's Tony Lamas do to you? There's a comeuppance for everyone, wherever you are, and the farther you go from your own fiefdom, the more ludicrous are your haircut, your clothes, your opinions, your life. Within easy walking distance of home are neighborhoods that might as well be in Saigon. ~ Michael Cunningham

Anybody is influenced by where and how he lives. ~ Imogen Cunningham

I wanted to be a writer, that's all. I wanted to write about it all. Everything that happens in a moment. The way the flowers looked when you carried them in your arms. This towel, how it smells, how it feels, this thread. All our feelings, yours and mine. The history of it, who we once were. Everything in the world. Everything all mixed up, like it's all mixed up now. ~ Michael Cunningham

If you stay in the running-if you have endurance-you are bound to win over those who haven't. ~ Glenn 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

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

Better, then, to go light on the sexual particulars, and think instead of who's winning and who's losing at any given point. How is power being exchanged here? I want to say, "Who's on top?" But that would of course be sleazy, and just generally beneath me ... ~ Michael Cunningham

Some people say to me, Isn't it too bad that people discovered you so late? I never thought that. ~ Imogen Cunningham

I don't know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that."
"You don't have to go to the party. You don't have to go to the ceremony. You don't have to do anything at all."
"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. I'm so sick. ~ Michael Cunningham

When you go home at night, let your home be the place where you disconnect from the world and the grind of your job. Limit your social-media usage. Surfing Facebook keeps you connected physically, relationally, and emotionally to friends, work, and responsibilities. In turn, you wear down. ~ Ted 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. ~ Michael Cunningham

We all know how powerful the web can be for raising political money. Well, if you're game, the Duke Cunningham Legal Defense Fund is apparently ready to accept your donation. ~ Joshua Micah Marshall

We [with David Cunningham] did do Top Of The Pops. It was an eye-opener. I mean, one of the things that was so interesting - I've talked about this a few times recently, and people can't believe it - they used to do this thing called tape switch with the Musicians Union. ~ David Toop

I think it came from being a ruling class, from never being able to show weakness to the people they have conquered - to people like us. It gave them a sense of unyielding authority. ~ Peter Cunningham

Hey, Mr. Cunningham. How's your entailment gettin' along? ~ Harper Lee

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

Being born in a place is only one way to belong, nor do you have to die there....

I knew at once that Magdala was home because I felt sighted there again, second sighted. It was not only the spring. In time everything spoke.

When birds rose into the air, I could read the pattern of their wings, and the path the wind made on the water carried messages. The very ground said make a path here, plant herbs there. These vine are not dead. Tend them and they'll bear fruit again.

Ancient trees offered shelter and wisdom as well as olives. And there were certain rocks that could absorb fatigue or agitation, leaving me refreshed and calm. ~ Elizabeth Cunningham

Ever notice how the more depraved a man is, the more he tries to ruin other people's fun? ~ Elizabeth Cunningham

Today evil spirits are seen as negativity which floats around the Earth in large quantities. ~ Scott Cunningham

Jaina never intended to marry the prince."
"I see. He's not a Jedi."
"True, but that's not the issue. I'm guessing that the only man Jaina would ever take seriously is one who can outfly her."
"There are not many who fit that description."
"Yeah, I've noticed that."
Kyp & Jag ~ Elaine 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

Oh, you ask me, what is the greatest torture of a person who does portraits for a living? I could fill several volumes with nice nasty stories. I don't know. ~ Imogen Cunningham

Most professionals specialize in only part of the complex community revitalization process. Incomplete efforts usually create messy, expensive, demoralizing failures. Few specialists understand how to bring a place back to life with a holistic approach. If anyone understands the complete revitalization process, it's Storm Cunningham. He's spent over a decade rigorously studying successes and failures worldwide. He can look at a community, regional, or organizational regeneration or redevelopment process, and quickly spot what's wrong ... what's missing. ~ Lindsey Davis

It seems good enough; parts seem very good indeed. She has lavish hopes, of course - she wants this to be her best book, the one that finally matches her expectations. ~ Michael Cunningham

Lead generation excels when a campaign is looking to capture a piece of factual intelligence that could never be modelled or predicted through profiling and sophisticated propensity algorithms. ~ Chris Cunningham

Global collaboration is something that Wiki mastered in a small way and here we can master it in a big way. ~ Ward Cunningham

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

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

Look at the sky. Does its sapphire hue dim when you take a single breath? Are the stars drawn closer when you weep? The sky cannot be diminished so. Thus it is with the spirit: it is a thing without beginning or end. ~ Elaine Cunningham

The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet. ~ Imogen Cunningham

Where did the boy genius go? He had been, as a child, expected to be a neurosurgeon, or a great novelist. And now he's considering (or, okay, refusing to consider) law school. Was the burden of his potential too much for him? ~ Michael Cunningham

Thinking and saying you are handicapable instead of handicapped will not change anything about your disease or illness. It will help you think more positively about it though. ~ Tom Cunningham

Women are the only oppressed group in our society that lives in intimate association with their opressors. ~ Evelyn Cunningham

How do you know if you are living to far above (or below) those among whom you are ministering? Ask yourself this question: Is this (car, house, lifestyle) helping me or hindering me in winning and discipling people for Jesus? ~ Loren 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

It's true that my mom loved it when I played Joanie Cunningham in the musical 'Happy Days,' but I think she finally realized I am never going to do 'Oklahoma!' ~ Christine Lakin

Among peoples who possess a highly developed pugnacious instinct we find the greatest progress in the arts, sciences, social and political organization, commerce and industry. The instinct takes the milder form of rivalry which is the motive force of the great portion of the serious labors of mankind. ~ Holly Estil Cunningham

Don't fight the waves. Dive under, bob up, or catch the curl and ride the wave. The ocean is stronger than you; you might as well be a matchstick in comparison. But if you yield to the waves, they carry you, their power becomes you. ~ Elizabeth Cunningham ~ Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

Beauty lies not in a flawless complexion, but in the stories that are told by each transitioning line on a woman's face. ~ Alyscia Cunningham

We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. 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, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know 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 ... ~ Michael Cunningham

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

My dance classes were open to anybody, my only stipulation was that they had to come to the class every day. ~ Merce Cunningham

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

Virginia Woolf came along in the early part of the century and essentially said through her writing, yes, big books can be written about the traditional big subjects. There is war. There is the search for God. These are all very important things. ~ Michael Cunningham

The implication of this particular tale is: Trust strangers. Believe in magic. ~ Michael Cunningham

Cunningham himself said in an interview in Poz that he couldn't help noticing that as soon as he wrote a novel without a blowjob, they gave him the Pulitzer Prize. ~ Christopher Bram

Magic is the practice of causing change through the use of powers as yet not defined or accepted by science. ~ Scott Cunningham

This moment may come to us all, at some point in our eventutal move from health into sickness. We abandon our old obligation to consider the needs of others, and give ourselves up to their care. There is a shift in status. We become citizens of a new realm, and although we retain the best and worst of our former selves we are no longer bodily in command of our fates. ~ Michael Cunningham

The problem is I'm not a good photographer. To be perfectly honest, I'm too shy. Not aggressive enough. Well, I'm not aggressive at all. I just loved to see wonderfully dressed women, and I still do. That's all there is to it. ~ Bill Cunningham

The next time you say 'Life isn't fair' remember that 40% of the world lives on less than $2/day and does not eat every day. How does your 'not fair' compare to theirs? - Tom Cunningham ~ Tom Cunningham

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

I've learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself. It is not, of course, translated into another language but it is a translation from the images in the author's mind to that which he is able to put down on paper. 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. It's one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it's transcendent, it's brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire. But even if the book in question turns out fairly well, it's never the book that you'd hoped to write. It's smaller than the book you'd hoped to write. It is an object, a collection of sentences, and it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire. It feels, in short, like a rather inept translation of a mythical great work. The translator, then, is simply moving the book another step along the translation continuum. The translator is translating a translation. ~ Michael Cunningham

I definitely want to be involved but only while I think I can make a contribution and I make a difference. ~ Kenny Cunningham

high capital intensity companies can also be attractive, especially where the capital requirement confers stability and deters entrants. ~ Lawrence A. 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

She simply does what her daughter tells her to, and finds a surprising relief in it. Maybe, she thinks, one could begin dying into this: the ministrations of a grown daughter, the comforts of a room. Here, then, is age. Here are the little consolations, the lamp and the book. Here is the world, increasingly managed by people who are not you; who will do either well or badly; who do not look at you when they pass you in the street. ~ Michael Cunningham

If I were thinking clearly, Leonard, I would tell you that I wrestle alone in the dark, in the deep dark. And that only I can know, only I can understand my own condition. You live with the threat, you tell me you live with the threat of my extinction. Leonard, I live with it too. ~ Michael Cunningham

In the end I just let the dreams come and go, let whatever bliss or pain they brought roll through me.

...Time wears away hope like water wears away rock. As for faith, I remained in a standoff with Isis. But love, as Paul of Tarsus would say, is greater than hope and faith. It can survive without either. Love was all I had, and it would not go away. It would not die even though sometimes I wished it would. ~ Elizabeth Cunningham

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

I hate big models. ~ Imogen Cunningham

There are certain things you don't discuss with Ansel, especially if you don't agree. ~ Imogen 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

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

You can always go back and reconstruct stuff in a documentary, but it's so much cooler when you're there as it happens. ~ Ed Cunningham

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

I changed my mind because of a scene between Howard Cunningham and Richie. The father-son situation was written so movingly, I fell in love with the project. ~ Tom Bosley

Peter is still amazed at the degree to which a certain widening gyre of accolades can change an artist's work, literally change it, not just the new stuff but the old as well, the pieces that have been around for a while, that have seemed "interesting" or "promising" but minor, until (not often, just once in a while) an artist is by some obscure consensus declared to have been neglected, misrepresented, ahead of his time. What's astonishing to Peter is the way the work itself seems to change, more or less in the way of a reasonably pretty girl who is suddenly treated as a beauty. Peculiar, clever Victoria Hwang is going to be in Artforum next month, and probably in the collections of the Whitney and the Guggenheim; Renee Zellweger - moonfaced, squinty-eyed, a character actress if ever there was one - was just on the cover of Vogue, looking ravishing in a silver gown. It is, of course, a trick of perception - the understanding that that funny little artist or that quirky-looking girl must be taken with new seriousness - but Peter suspects there's a deeper change at work. Being the focus of that much attention (and, yes, of that much money) seems to differently excite the molecules of the art or the actress or the politician. It's not just a phenomenon of altered expectations, it's a genuine transubstantiation, brought about by altered expectations. Renée Zellweger becomes a beauty, and would look like a beauty to someone who had never heard of her. Victoria Hwang's videos and ~ 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

My dad's more three-dimensional than Opie Taylor or Richie Cunningham. He even has a temper! He's a real person. But some people are disappointed by that. ~ Bryce Dallas Howard

What I was caught up in, I dimly understood, was the embodiment of history ~ Peter Cunningham

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

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

No time in history has the Church of Jesus Christ gone down! ~ Loren Cunningham

In the 1980s a small group of individuals became concerned about the Earth's temperature and what it might do in the future. I hesitate to call them scientists because they have abandoned their scientific principals by which their guess about temperature increases and the cause could achieve scientific acceptance or rejection. ~ Walter Cunningham

I left hating the game of football ... I never ever wanted to play football after that and I kind of rode off into the sunset. ~ Randall Cunningham

I'm talking about a little truth-in-packaging here. To be perfectly frank, you don't quite look like yourself. And if you walk around looking like someone other than who you are, you could end up getting the wrong job, the wrong friends, who knows what-all. You could end up with somebody else's life."
I shrugged again, and smiled. "This is my life," I said. "It doesn't seem like the wrong one. ~ Michael Cunningham

Arsenal's defence will be a worry going forward ~ Kenny Cunningham

It's not a matter of what you deserve -- and more to the point -- certainly not a matter of what you THINK you deserve. All that matters is what you're committed to, and how you honor that commitment, and -- sometimes -- what you are blessed by. ~ M. Allen 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

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

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

She lifted my head up with her woundless hands and smiled. Her smile could make the day last a lifetime. I wanted to kiss her. She placed her hand on my heart. I tried to pull her close to me but I knew my life was coming to an end. It would be meaningless. Why would anyone care for a monster that I am? ~ S.K. Cunningham