Michael Cunningham Quotes

103 quotes in 1537 categories

• we become the stories we tell ourselves
• 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…
• 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…
• What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half.
• Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.
• Maybe it’s not, in the end, the virtues of others that so wrenches our hearts as it is the sense of almost unbearably poignant recognition…
• That summer when she was eighteen, it seemed anything could happen, anything at all.
• You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.
• 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.
• We’d hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves.
• I am beginning to understand the true difference between youth and age. Young people have time to make plans and think of new ideas. Older…
• She is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other word for it.
• She thinks how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in gestures…
• She'd never imagined it like this-when she thought of someone (a woman like herself)losing her mind, she'd imagined shrieks and wails, hallucinations; but at that…
• That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other.
• 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…
• 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…
• The only difference was one of them was trying to make a perfect cake and one of them was trying to write a great book.…
• As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both 'Moby…
• I think great poetry is enormously powerful.

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