Michael Cunningham Quotes

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.

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

I see myself..in those pages as she goes back and forth, enjoying simply enjoying the beauties of the moments then chastising herself for having ‘no edge’ being simple and worse, harmless.

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 moment it had seemed clear that there was another way, far quieter; a way that was numb and hopeless, flat, so much so that an emotion as strong as sorrow would have been a relief.

Men may congratulate themselves for writing truly and passionately about the movements of nations; they may consider war and the search for God to be great literature's only subjects; but if men's standing in the world could be toppled by an ill-advised choice of hat, English literature would be dramatically changed.

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

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

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 walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book...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 a 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, right then. There has been no other.

It seems that she can survive, she can prosper, if she has London around her.

You grow weary of being treated as the enemy simply because you are not young anymore; because you dress unexceptionally.

It's the solitude that slays you. Maybe because you'd expected ruin to arrive in a grander and more romantic form.

That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other.

It was either the wind or the spirit of the house itself, briefly unsettled by our nocturnal absence but to old to be surprised by the errands born from the gap between what we can imagine and what we can in fact create.

...and when somebody comes up to me with big hair and gobs of makeup on and says, 'Can I help you,' it's all I can do not to scream, 'Bitch, you can't even help yourself.

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 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 then you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick.