Michael Cunningham Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

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

  Michael Cunningham

  Rich, Lifestyle, Feels

  4 Copy quote

• If you've really loved a book, or a movie for that matter, really loved it, what you want is that same book again, but as if you've never read it. And when you get something unfamiliar, you feel betrayed.

  Michael Cunningham

  Book, Betrayed, Want

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• A certain slightly cruel disregard for the feelings of living people is simply part of the package. I think a writer, if hes any good, is not an entirely benign entity in the world.

  Michael Cunningham

  Thinking, People, Feelings

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

  7 Copy quote

• Sure, go ahead, simulate life, using only ink and paper.

  Michael Cunningham

  Ink And Paper, Ink, Paper

  "Michael Cunningham on Reading the 'Invisible Classics'" by Michael Cunningham, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 1, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write.

  Michael Cunningham

  Book, Writing, Secret

  "Found in Translation". www.nytimes.com. October 2, 2010.

  4 Copy quote

• There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined.

  Michael Cunningham

  Inspirational, Odds, Giving

  Michael Cunningham (1998). “The Hours: A Novel”, p.225, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

  6 Copy quote

• Please, God, send me something to adore.

  Michael Cunningham

  Adore, Please

  Michael Cunningham (2010). “By Nightfall: A Novel”, p.76, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  4 Copy quote

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

  Michael Cunningham

  Worry, Wrong Things

  Michael Cunningham (2010). “By Nightfall: A Novel”, p.17, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  4 Copy quote

• He's one of those smart, drifty young people who, after certain deliberations, decides he wants to do Something in the Arts but won't, possibly can't, think in terms of an actual job; who seems to imagine that youth and brains and willingness will simply summon an occupation, the precise and perfect nature of which will reveal itself in its own time.

  Michael Cunningham

  Art, Jobs, Thinking

  Michael Cunningham (2010). “By Nightfall: A Novel”, p.12, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  6 Copy quote

• She is, above all else, tired; she wants more than anything to return to her bed and her book. The world, this world, feels suddenly stunned and stunted, far from everything.

  Michael Cunningham

  Book, Tired, Bed

  4 Copy quote

• Yes," she answers and does not move. She might, at this moment, be nothing but a floating intelligence; not even a brain inside a skull, just a presence that perceives, as a ghoast might. Yes, she thinks, this is probably how it must feel to be a ghost. It's a little like reading, isn't it-that same sensation of knowing people, settings, situations, without playing any particular part beyond that of the willing observer.

  Michael Cunningham

  Moving, Reading, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• I feel like there's something terrible and wonderful and amazing that's just beyond my grasp. I have dreams about it. I do dream, by the way. It hovers over me at odd moments. And then it's gone. I feel like I'm always on the brink of something that never arrives. I want to either have it or be free of it.

  Michael Cunningham

  Dream, Gone, Want

  4 Copy quote

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

  Michael Cunningham

  Party, Sick, Faces

  4 Copy quote

• 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 stepping into the kitchen - into its soft nowhere quality and foggy hum. I breathed the dark air. If I had at that moment a sense of calm kindly death while my heart beat and my lungs expanded, he might know a similar sense of life in the middle of his ongoing death.

  Michael Cunningham

  Brother, Moving, Heart

  4 Copy quote

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