Quotes from Michael Cunningham

She is better, she is safer, if she rests in Richmond; if she does not speak too much, write too much, feel too much; if she does not travel impetuously to London and walk through its streets; and yet she is dying this way, she is gently dying on a bed of roses.

he crawled among the gnarls and snags of his father's vineyard, tying errant tendrils back to the stakes with rough brown cord that was to his mind the exact color and texture of righteous, doomed effort.

If I die tomorrow, Provincetown is where I'd want my ashes scattered. Who knows why we fall in love, with places or people, with objects or ideas? Thirty centuries of literature haven't begun to solve the mystery; nor have they in any way slaked our interest in it. Provincetown is a mysterious place, and those of us who love it tend to do so with a peculiar, inscrutable intensity.

Usputna ?injenica: kukce ne privla?i plamen svije?e, privla?i ih svjetlo onkraj plamena, oni odlaze u vatru i ispeku se, odu u ništavilo jer toliko žude za svjetlom s druge strane.

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.

There were no weapons of mass destruction. And we bombed them anyway. And, by the way he's destroyed the economy. He's squandered something in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars. It seems impossible to Tyler that that might not matter. It drives him insane.

I was still struggling to invent an alternate version of myself, someone proud and unflinching who could gaze levelly at his father and tell him his last secrets. I wanted him to know me; to have seen me. I'd been waiting until I was settled and fulfilled, so as to present myself in terms of a happiness he might understand.

Oh, if men were the brutes and women the angels—if it were as simple as that. (Virginia Woolf's thought in The Hours)

Most people think they're not most people.

This moment may come to us all, at some point in our eventutal move from health into sickness. We abandon our old obligation to consider the needs of others, and give ourselves up to their care. There is a shift in status. We become citizens of a new realm, and although we retain the best and worst of our former selves we are no longer bodily in command of our fates.

I've been just wondering lately, if this is, you know, it. An apartment and a steady job and some people to love. What more could I want?

He needs a looser association. He needs something that implies a man who wants the ice shard to remain in his chest, who's learned to love the sensation of being pierced.

We are adaptable creatures. It's the source of our earthly comfort and, I suppose, of our silent rage goodreads

Cassandra wanted the same night over and over again but she believed in some hidden way that if she had the same night enough times it would all crack open, and something better than love would be revealed. Something better than music.

These spasms of emotion take him constantly. A song can do it; even the sight of an old dog. They pass. They usually pass. This time, though, tears start falling from his eyes almost before he knows it will happen, and for a moment a compartment of his being (the same compartment that counts steps, sips, claps) says to itself, He's crying, how strange. Louis leans forward, puts his face in his hands. He sobs.

I've always maintained you can either cure your neuroses or you can just outwait them.

Andrew, who, in the wry of certain gods, couldn't care less about human squabblings; who literally fails to understand them. There are all these fruits, there's water and sky, there's enough for everyone, what could you possibly have to argue about?

He pours himself more coffee, draws out a final, really final, line on the tabletop. Maybe he's just not Ã¢â'¬Â¦ awake enough to be gifted. Maybe one day, why not today, he'll bust out of his lifelong drowse.

He could see himself selling himself as a compelling mutation, a young god, proud to the point of sexy arrogance of his anatomical deviation: ninety percent thriving muscled man-flesh and ten percent glorious blindingly white angel wing. Baby, these feathers are going to tickle you halfway to heaven, and this man-part is going to take you the rest of the way.

This, after all, is the king who passed the law about putting trousers on cats and dogs, who made too-loud laughter a punishable crime. According to rumor, he was abused by his father, the last king. But that's the story people always tell, isn't it, when they want to explain inexplicable behavior?

Ciò che ricorda con assoluta chiarezza è di essere seduto su un treno diretto a Madrid, a provare il tipo di felicità che immaginava potessero sentire gli spiriti, liberati dai loro corpi terreni ma ancora in possesso della parte essenziale di sé.

Hiiohoo ja tikkerperi, täällä haisee ihmisveri! Olkoon elävä tai vainaa, luunsa kohta soppaan lainaa!

Eukko tarjoilee jättiläiselle härän. Kokonaisen härän. Jättiläinen: Hmm. Maistuu ihan tavalliselta härältä minun suussani. Eukko: Jos minä en sitten enää hanki tätä sorttia. Jättiläinen: Ei tavallisessa härässä ole mitään vikaa. Eukko: Niin, mutta pieni vaihtelu silloin tällöin... Jättiläinen: Sinä olet mainoksen uhri.

I'm moved by the effort, not the object; a demand for something rare and precious can only turn devotion into errand.