Michael Cunningham Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Michael Cunningham

  Strong, Mind, Sorrow

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• I have no useful theories about love and marriage.

  Michael Cunningham

  Love And Marriage, Theory

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• I love movies, I love television, I love narratives of all kinds.

  Michael Cunningham

  Movie Love, Television, Narrative

  "Michael Cunningham: A life in writing" by Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. February 7, 2011.

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• 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

  Perfect, Perfection, Promise

  Michael Cunningham (1998). “The Hours: A Novel”, p.98, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

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• The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.

  Michael Cunningham

  Book, Writing, Artist

  Michael Cunningham (2014). “The Snow Queen: A Novel”, p.111, Macmillan

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• I seem to produce a novel approximately once every three years.

  Michael Cunningham

  Years, Three, Produce

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• It's the city's crush and heave that move you; its intricacy; its endless life. You know the story about Manhattan as a wilderness purchased for strings of beads, but you find it impossible not to believe that it has always been a city; that if you dug beneath it you would find the ruins of another, older city, and then another and another.

  Michael Cunningham

  Crush, Believe, Moving

  Michael Cunningham (1998). “The Hours: A Novel”, p.14, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

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• What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. Everything is gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

  Michael Cunningham

  Thinking, Two, People

  "Fictional character: Virginia Woolf". "The Hours", www.imdb.com. 2002.

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• The vestibule door opens onto a June morning so fine and scrubbed Classira pauses at the threshold as she would at the edge of a pool, watching the turquoise water lapping at the tiles, the liquid nets of sun wavering in the blue depths. As if standing at the edge of a pool she delays for a moment the plunge, the quick membrane of chill, the plain shock of immersion.

  Michael Cunningham

  Morning, June, Blue

  Michael Cunningham (1998). “The Hours: A Novel”, p.9, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

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• The kiss was innocent--innocent enough--but it was also full of something not unlike what Virginia wants from London, from life; it was full of a love complex and ravenous, ancient, neither this nor that. It will serve as this afternoon's manifestation of the central mystery itself, the elusive brightness that shines from the edges of certain dreams; the brightness which, when we awaken, is already fading from our minds, and which we rise in the hope of finding, perhaps today, this new day in which anything might happen, anything at all.

  Michael Cunningham

  Dream, Kissing, Virginia

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• Like the morning you walked out of that old house, when you were eighteen and I was, well, I had just turned nineteen, hadn't I? I was a nineteen-year-old and I was in love with Louis and I was in love with you, and I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful as the sight of you walking out a glass door in the early morning, still sleepy, in your underwear. Isn't it strange?

  Michael Cunningham

  Beautiful, Morning, Love You

  Michael Cunningham (1998). “The Hours: A Novel”, p.199, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• All over China, parents tell their children to stop complaining and to finish their quadratic equations and trigonometric functions because there are sixty-five million American kids going to bed with no math at all.

  Michael Cunningham

  Children, Kids, Math

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

  Michael Cunningham

  Sexy, Jumping, Tragedy

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• Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation resembles no book I've read before. If I tell you that it's funny, and moving, and true; that it's as compact and mysterious as a neutron; that it tells a profound story of love and parenthood while invoking (among others) Keats, Kafka, Einstein, Russian cosmonauts, and advice for the housewife of 1896, will you please simply believe me, and read it?

  Michael Cunningham

  Believe, Moving, Book

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• I just don't feel much interested in the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

  Michael Cunningham

  Rich, Lifestyle, Feels

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

  Michael Cunningham

  Death, Dimensions, Modest

  Michael Cunningham (1998). “The Hours: A Novel”, p.165, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

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• I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I've learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself.

  Michael Cunningham

  Book, Years, Needs

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• I think of the people who commit these acts as children. They're in their 20s, but like certain children, they have been told only one story, over and over. Like most children, they believe in an easily identifiable good and evil, and like most children, they are capable of unthinkable cruelty.

  Michael Cunningham

  Children, Believe, Thinking

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• Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest.

  Michael Cunningham

  Hero, Thinking, Virginia

  "Michael Cunningham: A life in writing" by Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. February 7, 2011.

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• It's the world, you live in it, even if some boy has made a fool of you.

  Michael Cunningham

  Boys, World, Fool

  Michael Cunningham (2010). “By Nightfall: A Novel”, p.222, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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

  Michael Cunningham

  Enemy, Dresses, Young

  Michael Cunningham (1998). “The Hours: A Novel”, p.23, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

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• On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.

  Michael Cunningham

  Summer, Night, Lovely

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• a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm

  Michael Cunningham

  Witch, Bohemian, Charm

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• She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric.

  Michael Cunningham

  Eccentric, Gifted

  Michael Cunningham (1998). “The Hours: A Novel”, p.4, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

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• He insists on a version of you that is funnier, stranger, more eccentric and prfound thatn you suspect yourself to be--capable of doing more good and more harm in the world than you've ever imagined--it is all but impossible not to believe, at least in his presence and a while after you've left him, that he alone sees through your essence, weighs your true qualities . . . and appreciates you more fully than anyone else ever has.

  Michael Cunningham

  Believe, Essence, Appreciate

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