Michael 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gus the driver is everywhere and yet he appears nowhere, not in portraits or photographs, not even in the stories of men like Barthelme and Carver, who were all about guys with jobs and prospects like Gus's but who insisted on more sorrow, more angst, than Gus remotely manifests. If Gus weeps sometimes for no reason, if he stands despairing in the aisle of a Wal-Mart, it is not apparent in his daily demeanor ... ~ Michael Cunningham

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

Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it's Marilyn heading off to bed. ~ Michael Cunningham

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

I wanted a settled life and a shocking one. Think of Van Gogh, cypress trees and church spires under a sky of writhing snakes. I was my father's daughter. I wanted to be loved by someone like my tough judicious mother and I wanted to run screaming through the headlights with a bottle in my hand. That was the family curse. We tended to nurse flocks of undisciplined wishes that collided and canceled each other out. The curse implied that if we didn't learn to train our desires in one direction or another we were likely to end up with nothing. Look at my father and mother today.

I married in my early twenties. When that went to pieces I loved a woman. At both of those times and at other times, too, I believed I had focused my impulses and embarked on a long victory over my own confusion. Now, in my late thirties, I knew less than ever about what I wanted. In place of youth's belief in change I had begun to feel a nervous embarrassment that ticked inside me like a clock. I'd never meant to get this far in such an unfastened condition. (p.142) ~ Michael Cunningham

She's had a long life. Now she's going to the Lord."
"Frankly it creeps me out a little when you say things like that," Simon said.
"It shouldn't. If you don't like 'Lord,' pick another word. She's going home. She's going back to the party. Whatever you like."
"I suppose you have some definite ideas about an afterlife."
"Sure. We get reabsorbed into the earthly and celestial mechanism."
"No heaven?"
"That's heaven."
"What about realms of glory? What about walking around in golden slippers?"
"We abandon consciousness as if we were waking from a bad dream. We throw it off like clothes that never fit us right. It's an ecstatic release we're physically unable to apprehend while we're in our bodies. Orgasm is our best hint, but it's crude and minor by comparison. ~ Michael Cunningham

It's better, really, to go out in a blaze. That's why we love Marilyn, and James Dean. We love the ones who walk right into the fire. ~ 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

From Labor Day through Halloween, the place is almost unbearably beautiful. The air during these weeks seems less like ether and more like a semisolid, clear and yet dense somehow, as if it were filled with the finest imaginable golden pollen. The sky tends toward brilliant ice-blue, and every thing and being is invested with a soft, gold-ish glow. Tin cans look good in this light; discarded shopping bags do. I'm not poet enough to tell you what the salt marsh looks like at high tide. I confess that when I lived year-round in Provincetown, I tended to become irritable toward the end of October, when one supernal day after another seemed to imply that the only reasonable human act was to abandon your foolish errands and plans, go outside, and fall to your knees. ~ 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

Catherine thought Simon was in the locket, and in heaven, and with them still. Lucas hoped she didn't expect him to be happy about having so many Simons to contend with. ~ Michael Cunningham

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

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

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

They're not tourists, either, they're nothing like the gawkers and brayers in a place like Times Square, but they don't live here, they live in Jersey or Westchester, they're burghers right out of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, they cross Broadway as if they fucking own it, they think they look rakish, they think they're creatures of the night, they have neighbors whom they consider burghers because they don't like driving in New York, because they'd rather stay home (right now, the woman in the fringed pashmina shawl, the one walking arm-in-arm with Cowboy Boots, explodes in laughter, a great smacking hoot of a laugh, a three-martinis laugh, audible for a block or so), while the residents of downtown Manhattan, the ones who survive the days here, walk more modestly, certainly more quietly, more like penitents, because it's almost impossible to maintain a sense of hubris when you live here, you're too constantly confronted by the rampant otherness of others; hubris is surely much more attainable when you've got a house and a lawn and an Audi, when you understand that at the end of the world you'll get a second's more existence because the bomb won't be aimed at you, the shock wave will take you out but you're not anybody's main target, you've removed yourself from the kill zone, no one gets shot where you live, no one gets stabbed by a random psychopath, the biggest threat to your personal, ongoing security is the possibility that the neighbor's son will break in and steal a ~ Michael Cunningham

Beauty is a whore, I like money better. ~ Michael 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

Dear Leonard. To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard. Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours. ~ Michael Cunningham

Heaven winked at you, right? Maybe. Maybe it did. Or maybe it was just an airplane and a cloud. But if heaven winks at anybody, it's probably the less-than-conspicious seekers; the ones who choose the path over the avenue, the gap in the hedge over the trumpeted gates. That's probably why there's no verifiable evidence, right?
The universe only winks at the ones no one will believe. ~ Michael Cunningham

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

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

How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him; if she'd returned Richard's kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him, never bought the packet of incense or the alpaca coat with rose-shaped buttons. Couldn't they have discovered something larger and stranger than what they've got. It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens; as being full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. That's who I was. This is who I am--a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port.

Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at the pond's edge at dusk, wearing cut-off ~ Michael Cunningham

The song is an unvarnished love shout, an implorement tinged with ... anger? Something like anger, but the anger of a philosoher, the anger of a pot. An anger directed at the transience of the world, at its heartbreaking beauty that collides constantly with our awareness of the fact that everything gets taken away, that we're being shown marvels but reminded always that they don't belong to us. They're sultans' treasures; we're lucky, we're expected to feel lucky to have been invited to see them at all. ~ Michael Cunningham

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

Barrett lingers awhile. He's not eager to relinquish the strange pleasure of sitting in the green chair, surrounded by the ever-diminishing offerings that had, just yesterday, been daily articles, watching the apartment disappear, piece by piece. ~ Michael Cunningham

She lays the book face down on her chest. Already her bedroom (no, their bedroom) feels more densely inhabited, more actual, because a character named Mrs. Dalloway is on her way to buy flowers. ~ Michael Cunningham

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

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

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

a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm ~ 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

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

I was still struggling to invent an alternate version of myself, someone proud and unflinching who could gaze levelly at his father and tell him his last secrets. I wanted him to know me; to have seen me. I'd been waiting until I was settled and fulfilled, so as to present myself in terms of a happiness he might understand. ~ Michael Cunningham

But then again, in addition to paper and cardboard ... a little illuminated box, that contains thousands and thousands of stories? People aren't fascinated by that? Really? ~ Michael Cunningham

A stray fact: insects are not drawn to candle flames, they are drawn to the light on the far side of the flame, they go into the flame and sizzle to nothingness because they're so eager to get to the light on the other side. ~ Michael Cunningham

Susan was a tough-minded romantic. She wanted to fall in love with a book. She always had reasons for her devotions, as an astute reader would, but she was, to her credit, probably the most emotional one among us. Susan could fall in love with a book in more or less the way one falls in love with a person. Yes, you can provide, if asked, a list of your loved one's lovable qualities: he's kind and funny and smart and generous and he knows the names of trees.
But he's also more than amalgamation of qualities. You love him, the entirety of him, which can't be wholly explained by even the most exhaustive explication of his virtues. And you love him no less for his failings. O.K., he's bad with money, he can be moody sometimes, and he snores. His marvels so outshine the little complaints as to render them ridiculous. ~ Michael Cunningham

Maybe – let's not rule it out – this will be the song that cuts clean, the one that matters, the one that sheds standard-issue romance and reveals, under its old skin, a raw blood-red devotion deeper than comfort, a desire profounder than schoolboy satisfaction, a yearning cold and immaculate and unstoppable as snow. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you've really loved a book, or a movie for that matter, really loved it, what you want is that same book again, but as if you've never read it. And when you get something unfamiliar, you feel betrayed. ~ Michael Cunningham

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

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