Quotes by Michael Cunningham

“How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him; if shed returned Richard's kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) ...”

“It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and 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...”

“I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.”

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”

“One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.”

“What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half.”

“Beauty is a whore, I like money better.”

“Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.”

“He needs a looser association. He needs something that implies a man who wants the ice shard to remain in his chest, who's learned to love the sensation of being pierced.”

“Im not this unusual, she said. Its just my hair.She looked at Bobby and she looked at me, with an expression at once disdainful and imploring. She was forty, pregnant, and in love with two men at o...”

“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 to...”

“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 ho...”

“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 sl...”

“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 do we want?" I asked blurrily."Aw, man, you know," he said. "We ju...”

“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...”

“There were no weapons of mass destruction. And we bombed them anyway.And, by the way he's destroyed the economy. He's squandered something in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars. It seems imposs...”

“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 ...”

“Do you ever think?What?They were lying together on the sofa that had always been there, the crappy beat-up biscuit-colored sofa that was managing, as best it could, its promotion from threadbare ju...”

“Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.”

“We worship numberless gods or idols, but we all need to be the grandest possible versions of ourselves, we need to walk across the face of the earth with as much grace and beauty as we can muster b...”