Michael Cunningham Quotes

...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.

What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story?

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. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers; and even the sex, once she and Richard reached that point, was ardent but awkward, unsatisfying, ore kindly than passionate. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's ind 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 tie, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

A writer should always feel like he's in over his head

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 and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.

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.

People are more than you think they are. And they’re less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.

Please, God, send me something to adore.

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

She wants to have baked a cake that banishes sorrow, even if only for a little while.

. . . he felt himself entering a moment so real he could only run toward it, shouting.

Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it's Marilyn heading off to bed.

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 people need their whole energy to keep up with what’s already been set in motion.

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.

We always worry about the wrong things, don't we?