Quotes from Michael Cunningham

Oh, all you immigrants and visionaries, what do you hope to find here, who do you hope to become?

Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?

And maybe – maybe – love will arrive, and remain.

Outside the house is a world where the shelves are stocked, where radio waves are full of music, where young men walk the streets again, men who have deprievation and a fear worse than death, who have willingly given up their early twenties and now, thinking of thirty and beyond, haven't any time to spare.

Have faith that you will be here, recognizable to yourself, again tomorrow.

Constantine, eight years old, was working in his father's garden and thinking about his own garden, a square of powdered granite he had staked out and combed into rows at the top of his family's land.

This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining.

She'll be willing to meet someone who can hold her interest for more than a few months, and that guy will teach her about domestic deepenings, the modest reliable thrill of the familiar, which as almost everyone but Liz knows has been the way of human happiness since humanity was born.

I wanted to be a writer, that's all. I wanted to write about it all. Everything that happens in a moment. The way the flowers looked when you carried them in your arms. This towel, how it smells, how it feels, this thread. All our feelings, yours and mine. The history of it, who we once were. Everything in the world. Everything all mixed up, like it's all mixed up now.

Here's the sting of livingness. He's back after his nightly voyage of sleep, all clarity and purpose; he's renewed his citizenship in the world of people who strive and connect, people who mean business, people who burn and want, who remember everything, who walk lucid and unafraid.

Julian is bluff and sturdy, royal; he possesses a gracefully muscular, equine beauty so natural it suggests that beauty itself is a fundamental human condition and not a mutation in the general design.

Our hopes may seem unrealized, but we were in all likelihood hoping for the wrong thing.

And so, a never-ending, rather edgy conversation between them, an undercurrent of roiling sound that reminded them they were married, they had two sons, they were living a life, they had preparations to make and disasters to avert and a world to interpret, sign by sign, symbol by symbol, to each other, and that at this point the only fate worse than staying together would be trying, each of them, to live alone.

She will never mention to Leonard that she'd planned on fleeing, even for a few hours. As if he were the one in need of care and comfort--as if he were the one in danger.

It's the solitude that slays you. Maybe because you'd expected ruin to arrive in a grander and more romantic form.

Who was it who said, the worst thing you can imagine is probably what's already happening? Shrink phrase. Not untrue, though.

Who has more power than a child? She can be as cruel as she wants to be. He can't.

She simply does what her daughter tells her to, and finds a surprising relief in it. Maybe, she thinks, one could begin dying into this: the ministrations of a grown daughter, the comforts of a room. Here, then, is age. Here are the little consolations, the lamp and the book. Here is the world, increasingly managed by people who are not you; who will do either well or badly; who do not look at you when they pass you in the street.

who refuses to distinguish between setback and catastrophe; who worships accomplishment above all else and makes himself unbearable to others because he genuinely believes he can root out and reform every incidence of human fecklessness and mediocrity.

Men may congratulate themselves for writing truly and passionately about the movements of nations; they may consider war and the search for God to be great literature's only subjects; but if men's standing in the world could be toppled by an ill-advised choice of hat, English literature would be dramatically changed.

Visions are answers. Answers imply questions. It

She pauses several treads from the bottom, listening, waiting; she is again possessed (it seems to be getting worse) by a dream-like feeling, as if she is standing in the wings, about to go onstage and perform in a play for which she is not appropriately dressed, and for which she has not adequately rehearsed.

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.

Here, then, is the last moment of true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on opaque water.