Merce Cunningham Quotes

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

I'm not expressing anything. I'm presenting people moving. ~ Merce Cunningham

There are no fixed points in space, ~ Merce Cunningham

Dancing is a spiritual exercise in a physical form. ~ Merce Cunningham

I think of dance as a constant transformation of life itself. ~ Merce Cunningham

You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.
~ Merce Cunningham

He seems to be supporting her tenderly. But what holds them together is difficult to pin down.
In her memoir, she wrote that he once dropped her on her hip very painfully, and she had the distinct impression he'd done it on purpose.
What really goes on between two people is very difficult to say. ~ Barbara Browning

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

Magic is our birthright ... and should be available to all who wish to utilize it as a tool of personal transformation. ~ Scott 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

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

I am hugely proud to have played for Ireland. ~ Kenny Cunningham

Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear. ~ Michael Cunningham

The very worst strategy is to try to hide a gun. Children are remarkably adept at finding things that Mom and Dad don't want them to find, and burglars make their living by doing so. No matter how well hidden you think it is, a gun that's not secured is an accident or crime waiting to happen. If they're not on you, lock 'em up. ~ Grant 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

We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep - it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, 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) knows 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. ~ Michael Cunningham

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

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

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

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

Hey, Cunningham - Andy Warhol called. You're at 14:55 and we're tickin' big-time here, Chachi. ~ Dennis Miller

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

Making films is hard. Awesome, but hard. ~ Colin 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

Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. ~ 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

Tracey Cunningham does my color, and little by little, my ombre turned into more of a rooted blond, and then it got lighter and lighter. I love how I stand out more as a blond - it makes me feel bright and healthy. ~ Khloe Kardashian

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

Clarissa will be bereaved, deeply lonely, but she will not die. She will be too much in love with life, with London. Virginia imagines someone else, yes, someone strong of body but frail-minded; someone with a touch of genius, of poetry, ground under by the wheels of the world, by war and government, by doctors; a someone who is, technically speaking insane, because that person sees meaning everywhere, knows that trees are sentient beings and sparrows sing in Greek. Yes, someone like that. Clarissa, sane Clarissa -exultant, ordinary Clarissa - will go on, loving London, loving her life of ordinary pleasures, and someone else, a deranged poet, a visonary, will be the one to die. ~ 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

Truth, says instrumentalism, is what works out, that which does what you expect it to do. The judgment is true when you can "bank" on it and not be disappointed. If, when you predict, or when you follow the lead of your idea or plan, it brings you to the ends sought for in the beginning, your judgment is true. It does not consist in agreement of ideas, or the agreement of ideas with an outside reality; neither is it an eternal something which always is, but it is a name given to ways of thinking which get the thinker where he started. As a railroad ticket is a "true" one when it lands the passenger at the station he sought, so is an idea "true," not when it agrees with something outside, but when it gets the thinker successfully to the end of his intellectual journey.

Truth, reality, ideas and judgments are not things that stand out eternally "there," whether in the skies above or in the earth beneath; but they are names used to characterize certain vital stages in a process which is ever going on, the process of creation, of evolution. In that process we may speak of reality, this being valuable for our purposes; again, we may speak of truth; later, of ideas; and still again, of judgments; but because we talk about them we should not delude ourselves into thinking we can handle them as something eternally existing as we handle a specimen under the glass.

Such a conception of truth and reality, the instrumentalist believes, is in harmony with the gener ~ Holly Estil Cunningham

cup of all purpose flour ~ Larissa Cunningham

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

College is a time in life where you get to know yourself as a player on the pitch and off the pitch. My coaches at USF were instrumental in making me understand the discipline it takes to succeed at the next level. Those were four special years for me. ~ Jeff Cunningham

What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around the pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows. That was the moment. There has been no other. ~ 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 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

Disagreements don't cause disunity, a lack of forgiveness does. ~ Loren Cunningham

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

The reality is that atmospheric CO2 has a minimal impact on greenhouse gases and world temperature. Water vapor is responsible for 95 percent of the greenhouse effect. CO2 contributes just 3.6 percent, with human activity responsible for only 3.2 percent of that. That is why some studies claim CO2 levels are largely irrelevant to global warming. ~ Walter Cunningham

To Admiral Cunningham it was against all tradition to abandon the Army in such a crisis. He declared, It takes the Navy three years to build a new ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition. ~ Winston S. Churchill

No matter where we come from, a little sugar is what everybody demands in life, what everybody needs in life. It's perhaps the main ingredient that keeps us alive. ~ Merce Cardus

I hate big models. ~ Imogen Cunningham

Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite. The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a standstill under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation, object-oriented or otherwise. ~ Ward Cunningham