Quotes from Michael Cunningham

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.

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

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.

The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.

One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

Beauty is a whore, I like money better.

I remember one morning getting up at dawn. There was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling. And I... I remember thinking to myself: So this is the beginning of happiness, this is where it starts. And of course there will always be more...never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment, right then.

There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.

There is 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) knows 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.

These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody's little display of genius.

What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. And there it is... It was death. I chose life.

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

I don't have any regrets, really, except that one. I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.

we become the stories we tell ourselves

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.

Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.

I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

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.

What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.

Perhaps, in the extravagance of youth, we give away our devotions easily and all but arbitrarily, on the mistaken assumption that we'll always have more to give.

She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other.