“ One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 2.2K
“ Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 1.5K
“ Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 830
“ I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 2.9K
“ I’m not this unusual,” she said. “It’s just my hair.” She looked at Bobby and she looked at me, with an expression at once disdainful and imploring. She was forty, pregnant, and in love with two men at once. I think what she could not abide was the zaniness of her life. Like many of us, she had grown up expecting romance to bestow dignity and direction. “Be brave,” I told her. Bobby and I stood before her, confused and homeless and lacking a plan, beset by an aching but chaotic love that refused to focus in the conventional way. Traffic roared behind us. A truck honked its hydraulic horn, a monstrous, oceanic sound. Clare shook her head, not in denial but in exasperation. Because she could think of nothing else to do, she began walking again, more slowly, toward the row of trees. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 2.1K
“ I wanted a settled life and a shocking one. Think of Van Gogh, cypress trees and church spires under a sky of writhing snakes. I was my father's daughter. I wanted to be loved by someone like my tough judicious mother and I wanted to run screaming through the headlights with a bottle in my hand. That was the family curse. We tended to nurse flocks of undisciplined wishes that collided and canceled each other out. The curse implied that if we didn't learn to train our desires in one direction or another we were likely to end up with nothing. Look at my father and mother today. I married in my early twenties. When that went to pieces I loved a woman. At both of those times and at other times, too, I believed I had focused my impulses and embarked on a long victory over my own confusion. Now, in my late thirties, I knew less than ever about what I wanted. In place of youth's belief in change I had begun to feel a nervous embarrassment that ticked inside me like a clock. I'd never meant to get this far in such an unfastened condition. (p.142) ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 432
“ We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. 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, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so... ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 1.6K
“ Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 2.6K
“ We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds & expectations, to burst open & give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 432
“ She's had a long life. Now she's going to the Lord." "Frankly it creeps me out a little when you say things like that," Simon said. "It shouldn't. If you don't like 'Lord,' pick another word. She's going home. She's going back to the party. Whatever you like." "I suppose you have some definite ideas about an afterlife." "Sure. We get reabsorbed into the earthly and celestial mechanism." "No heaven?" "That's heaven." "What about realms of glory? What about walking around in golden slippers?" "We abandon consciousness as if we were waking from a bad dream. We throw it off like clothes that never fit us right. It's an ecstatic release we're physically unable to apprehend while we're in our bodies. Orgasm is our best hint, but it's crude and minor by comparison. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 4K
“ Man," he said, "I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want." "What do we want?" I asked blurrily. "Aw, man, you know," he said. "We just want, well, the same things these people wanted." "What was that?" He shrugged. "To live, I guess," he said. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 3.8K
“ 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- Copy
- 3.7K
“ How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him; if she’d returned Richard's kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him, never bought the packet of incense or the alpaca coat with roseshaped buttons. Couldn’t they have discovered something larger and stranger than what they've got. It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens; as being full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself. Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. That's who I was. This is who I ama decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port. Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at the pond's edge at dusk, wearing cutoff jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway, and they had kissed. His mouth had opened to hers; (exciting and utterly familiar, she'd never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met its own. They'd kissed and walked around the pond together. 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. 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. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 3.9K
“ 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. 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 its 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. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 4K
“ I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 2K
“ One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
“ You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 3K
“ The only difference was one of them was trying to make a perfect cake and one of them was trying to write a great book. But if we remove that from the equation, it's the same impulse and they are equally entitled to their ecstasies and their despair. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 2.5K
“ If anything, I thought - and this view was shared by my publisher - that The Hours was going to be my arty little book and sell maybe a few thousand copies, and march with whatever dignity it could muster to the remainders tables. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 474
“ A movie star seemed simply like the nearest equivalent we've got, we who live blessedly free of a monarchy, to that sense of the human form exalted, the life made fabulous simply by who and what the person is. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 1.9K
“ A movie star seemed simply like the nearest equivalent we've got, we who live blessedly free of a monarchy, to that sense of the human form exalted, the life made fabulous simply by who and what the person is. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 1.5K
“ The only difference was one of them was trying to make a perfect cake and one of them was trying to write a great book. But if we remove that from the equation, it's the same impulse and they are equally entitled to their ecstasies and their despair. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 3.9K
“ The only difference was one of them was trying to make a perfect cake and one of them was trying to write a great book. But if we remove that from the equation, it's the same impulse and they are equally entitled to their ecstasies and their despair. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 654
“ The only difference was one of them was trying to make a perfect cake and one of them was trying to write a great book. But if we remove that from the equation, it's the same impulse and they are equally entitled to their ecstasies and their despair. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 696
“ The only difference was one of them was trying to make a perfect cake and one of them was trying to write a great book. But if we remove that from the equation, it's the same impulse and they are equally entitled to their ecstasies and their despair. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 989
“ A movie star seemed simply like the nearest equivalent we've got, we who live blessedly free of a monarchy, to that sense of the human form exalted, the life made fabulous simply by who and what the person is. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 3.5K
“ I'm sure there are any number of Hollywood producers who option novels and think, 'maybe this would make a good opera. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 2.1K
“ A movie star seemed simply like the nearest equivalent we've got, we who live blessedly free of a monarchy, to that sense of the human form exalted, the life made fabulous simply by who and what the person is. ”
- Michael Cunningham- Copy
- 1.8K
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