Quotes by 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 bus...”

“I suppose at heart it was the haircut that did it; that exploded the ordinary order of things and showed me the possibilities that had been there all along, hidden among the patterns in the wallpap...”

“There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.”

“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 des...”

“...a much younger woman, one of those round-faced, tiny-featured women who were touted as beauties though they were not in fact particularly beautiful. They were simply the daughters of wealthy fam...”

“How are you feeling, man?" he asks me."Great," I tell him, and it is purely the truth. Doves clatter up out of a bare tree and turn at the same instant, transforming themselves from steel to silver...”

“I was not beautiful, but I believed I had the possibility of beauty in me.”

“This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.”

“The point of sex is... Sex doesn't have a point.”

“Which is probably one of the reasons those of us who love contemporary fiction love it as we do. Were alone with it. It arrives without references, without credentials we can trust. Givers of prize...”

“He says, '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 t...”

“A celestial light appeared to Barrett Meeks in the sky over Central Park, four days after Barrett had been mauled, once again, by love.”

“The implication of this particular tale is: Trust strangers. Believe in magic.”

“One of the reasons ordinary people are incapable of magic is simple dearth of conviction.”

“She'd never been religious. She hadn't allowed grief to send her crawling to the church.”

“You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.”

“She has failed. She wishes she didn't mind. Something, she thinks, is wrong with her.”

“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,...”

“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 ...”

“Maybe lets 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 ...”