Quotes from Michael Cunningham

Clarissa, sane Clarissa-exultant, ordinary Clarissa- will go on, loving London, loving her life of ordinary pleasure, and someone else, a deranged poet, a visionary, will be the one to die.

He moved in a world of chaos of self, fearful and astonished to be here, right here, alive in a pine-paneled bedroom.

I knew how I sounded - slow and oafish, like the cousin who gets ditched and goes on playing alone, as if he'd planned it that way. I couldn't quite tell her about the daily beauty, how I didn't tire of seeing 6 a.m. light on the telephone wires. When I was younger, I'd expected to grow out of the gap between the self I knew and what I heard myself say. I'd expected to feel more like one single person.

Everything is infected with brightness, throbbing with it, and she prays for dark the way a wanderer lost in the desert prays for water. The world is every bit as barren of darkness as a desert is of water. There is no dark in the shuttered room, no dark behind her eyelids. There are only greater and lesser degrees of radiance. When she's crossed over to this realm of relentless brilliance, the voices start.

Maybe – let's not rule it out – this will be the song that cuts clean, the one that matters, the one that sheds standard-issue romance and reveals, under its old skin, a raw blood-red devotion deeper than comfort, a desire profounder than schoolboy satisfaction, a yearning cold and immaculate and unstoppable as snow.

Youth is the only sexy tragedy.

It is only after knowing him for some time that you begin to realize you are, to him, an essentially fictional character, one he has invested with nearly limitless capacities for tragedy and comedy not because that is your true nature but because he, Richard, needs to live in a world peopled by extreme and commanding figures.

It's your life, quite possibly your only one. Still you find yourself having a vodka at three a.m., waiting for your pill to kick in, with time ticking through you and your own ghost already wandering among your rooms.

Per un momento sono semplicemente e completamente felici. Ci sono, proprio adesso, e sono riuscite, in qualche modo, nel corso di diciotto anni, a continuare ad amarsi. È abbastanza. In questo momento è abbastanza.

Heaven winked at you, right? Maybe. Maybe it did. Or maybe it was just an airplane and a cloud. But if heaven winks at anybody, it's probably the less-than-conspicious seekers; the ones who choose the path over the avenue, the gap in the hedge over the trumpeted gates. That's probably why there's no verifiable evidence, right? The universe only winks at the ones no one will believe.

Women are kind of screwed, in the world," Andrew says.

Sometimes the fabric that separates us tears just enough for love to shine through. Sometimes the tear is surprisingly small.

If you live in certain places, in a certain way, you'd better learn to praise the small felicities.

Who knows what succession of girls and boys sneak in through the sliding glass doors at night, after the mother has sunk to the bottom of her own private lake, with the help of Absolut and Klonopin?

God save us from people who think they're smarter than they actually are.

It helps, of course - let's not get carried away - if you'er a young prince like Mizzy, and you've actually got something of value to destroy in the first place.

Do you imagine, Peter, that your Carpe Diem boots would look any less deluded to them than that guy's Tony Lamas do to you? There's a comeuppance for everyone, wherever you are, and the farther you go from your own fiefdom, the more ludicrous are your haircut, your clothes, your opinions, your life. Within easy walking distance of home are neighborhoods that might as well be in Saigon.

I know a conquistador when I see one. I know all about making a splash. It isn't hard. If you shout loud enough, for long enough, a crowd will gather to see what all the noise is about. It's the nature of crowds. They don't stay long, unless you give them reason.

I reminded myself our lives are made of changes we can't control. Letting little things happen is a good practice.

a much younger woman, one of those round-faced, tiny-featured women who were touted as beauties though they were not in fact particularly beautiful. They were simply the daughters of wealthy families powerful enough to demand that the concept of beauty be expanded to include them.

Mizzy has, again, wandered into the garden, like a child who feels no fealty to adult conversation.

Writing in that state is the most profound satisfaction she knows, but her access to it comes and goes without warning. She may pick up her pen and follow it with her hand as it moves across the paper; she may pick up her pen and find she's merely herself, a woman in a housecoat holding a pen, afraid and uncertain, only mildly competent, with no idea about where to begin or what to write. She picks up her pen

Gus the driver is everywhere and yet he appears nowhere, not in portraits or photographs, not even in the stories of men like Barthelme and Carver, who were all about guys with jobs and prospects like Gus's but who insisted on more sorrow, more angst, than Gus remotely manifests. If Gus weeps sometimes for no reason, if he stands despairing in the aisle of a Wal-Mart, it is not apparent in his daily demeanor...

He'll be successful, finally, this coming Sunday, at the modest ceremony to be held in the living room. It's all so clear. Tyler will write a beautiful, meaningful song. Barrett will find a love that abides, and work that matters. And Liz. Liz will tire of boys, tire of her resolution to grow into a tough, colorful old woman who lives defiantly alone.