Michael Cunningham quotes

Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest. (Michael Cunningham)
There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.
Michael Cunningham
I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
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
What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted something alive and shocking enough that it could be a morning in somebody's life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that.
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
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
Insomniacs know better than anyone how it would be to haunt a house.
Michael Cunningham
She will remain sane and she will live as she was meant to live, richly and deeply, among others of her kind, in full possession and command of her gifts.
Michael Cunningham
That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other.
Michael Cunningham
What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story? (Michael Cunningham)
Please, God, send me something to adore.
Michael Cunningham
One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
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
The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.
Michael Cunningham
we become the stories we tell ourselves.
Michael Cunningham
She is, above all else, tired; she wants more than anything to return to her bed and her book. The world, this world, feels suddenly stunned and stunted, far from everything.
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
Perhaps, in the extravagance of youth, we give away our devotions easily and all but arbitrarily, on the mistaken assumption that we'll always have more to give.
Michael 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
She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself. (Michael Cunningham)
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.
Michael Cunningham
This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.
Michael Cunningham
She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric.
Michael Cunningham
A certain slightly cruel disregard for the feelings of living people is simply part of the package. I think a writer, if he's any good, is not an entirely benign entity in the world.
Michael Cunningham