Quotes from Michael Cunningham

I was not beautiful, but I believed I had the possibility of beauty in me.

He makes her think sometimes of a mouse singing amorous ballads under the window of a giantess.

Parents are the mystified criminals, blinking in the docks, making it all the worse for themselves with every word they utter.

I'm just a child who's learned to impersonate an adult.

Isn't the universe full of gaseous elements?" Andrew says, "Yeah, there are gases and neutrinos and this shit they call dark matter.

There's the appeal of the young thief who robs you, and climbs back down off your cloud. It's possible to love that boy, in a wistful and hopeless way. It's possible to love his greed and narcissism, to grant him that which is beyond your own capacities: heedlessness, cockiness, a self-devotion so pure it borders on the divine.

She could, she thinks, have entered a different life. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

One of the reasons ordinary people are incapable of magic is simple dearth of conviction.

He seemed to believe that from such humble, inert elements as flour, shortening, and drab little envelopes of yeast, life itself could be produced.

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.

a full week of their mother's quiet fury over the fun they don't seem to be having and their father's dogged attempts to provide it...

Love, it seems, arrives not only unannounced, but so accidentally, so randomly, as to make you wonder why you, why anyone, believes even fleetingly in laws of cause and effect

She loves the world for being rude and indestructible, and she knows that other people must love it too, poor as well as rich, though no one speaks specifically of the reasons. Why else do we struggle to go on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed? Even when we're further gone than Richard; even if we're fleshless, blazing with lesions, shitting in the sheets; still, we want desperately to live.

Mensen zijn dom. Op een trommel slaan om een beer aan het dansen te krijgen, terwijl we de sterren zouden willen ontroeren.

Zoe loved Trancas's mother. She respected her exhausted and ironic hope for rebirth.

My little girl, oh, the daughter I never had. Now tell me, angel, are you fucking anybody new?

And yet, it gives Peter nothing. Not now. Not today. Not when he needs... more. More than this well-executed idea. More than the shark in the tank meant to frighten, more than the guy on the street meant to say something pithy about celebrity. More than this.

Beauty is a whore. I prefer money.

She thinks of how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in gestures and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.

He's filled with a sense of childish release, the old feeling that because you are sick, all your trials and obligations have been suspended.

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end. But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

Beauty - the beauty Peter craves - is this, then: a human bundle of accidental grace and doom and hope. Mizzy must have hope, he must, he wouldn't shine like this if he were in true despair, and of course he's young, who in this world despairs more exquisitely than the young, it's something the old tend to forget.

What did Shakespeare say? Or little lives are rounded with a sleep.

There is no one there to see it. The world is doing what it always does, demonstrating itself to itself. The world has no interest in the little figures that come and go, the phantoms that worry and worship, that rake the graveled paths and erect the occasional rock garden, the bronze boy-man, the hammered cup for snow to fall into.