Quotes from Michael Cunningham

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.

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

She will remain sane and she will live as she was meant to live, richly and deeply, among others of her kind, in full possession and command of her gifts.

What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me & incredibly good. I want to say that - everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has 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.

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.

Insomniacs know better than anyone how it would be to haunt a house.

A stray fact: insects are not drawn to candle flames, they are drawn to the light on the far side of the flame, they go into the flame and sizzle to nothingness because they're so eager to get to the light on the other side.

I'm talking about a little truth-in-packaging here. To be perfectly frank, you don't quite look like yourself. And if you walk around looking like someone other than who you are, you could end up getting the wrong job, the wrong friends, who knows what-all. You could end up with somebody else's life. I shrugged again, and smiled. This is my life, I said. It doesn't seem like the wrong one.

She is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other word for it.

What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story?

and when somebody comes up to me with big hair and gobs of makeup on and says, 'Can I help you,' it's all I can do not to scream, 'Bitch, you can't even help yourself.

Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself.

Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.

People are more than you think they are. And they're less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.

She wants to have baked a cake that banishes sorrow, even if only for a little while.

A writer should always feel like he's in over his head

We'd hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves.

I am beginning to understand the true difference between youth and age. Young people have time to make plans and think of new ideas. Older people need their whole energy to keep up with what's already been set in motion.

Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together.

Please, God, send me something to adore.

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

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

Here is what unsayable about us: Jonathan and I are members of a team so old nobody else could join even if we wanted them to. What binds us is stronger than sex. It is stronger than love. We're related. Each of us is the other born into a different flesh.

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.