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There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.

Michael Cunningham

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Michael Cunningham
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 6
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Cincinnati
Ohio
Perfect
Stills
Part
Still
Singular
Time
Clearly
Seemed
Perfection
Promise

More quotes by Michael Cunningham

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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.
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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.
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I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first draft. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that closely resembles the sentence I first set down. I just find that I have to keep zapping and zapping the English language until it starts to behave in some way that vaguely matches my intentions.
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Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.
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Man, he said, I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want. What do we want? I asked blurrily. Aw, man, you know, he said. We just want, well, the same things these people wanted. What was that? He shrugged. To live, I guess, he said.
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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.
Michael Cunningham
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Any other vexations to report? he asks. I love the word 'vexations.' It's the 'x.' Nice to jump off a 'v' and bite into an 'x' like that. Just the usual ones, she says. How was the weekend? Vexing. Not really, I just wanted to say it. You?
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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.
Michael Cunningham
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You could say I don't want for me be seen primarily as a gay writer. I've never hidden my sexuality. It matters that I'm gay, it matters that I'm white, it matters that I'm male, it matters that I'm American. But basically it's just less and less of a big deal.
Michael Cunningham
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Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.
Michael Cunningham
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The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.
Michael Cunningham
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Please, God, send me something to adore.
Michael Cunningham
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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.
Michael Cunningham
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The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.
Michael Cunningham
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There's 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.
Michael Cunningham
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..this indiscriminate love feels entirely serious to her, as if everything in the world is part of a vast, inscrutable intention and everything in the world has its own secret name, a name that cannot be conveyed in language but is simply the sight and feel of the thing itself.
Michael Cunningham
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What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.
Michael Cunningham
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We always worry about the wrong things, don't we?
Michael Cunningham
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People are more than you think they are. And they're less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.
Michael Cunningham
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Her cake is a failure, but she is loved anyway. She is loved, she thinks, in more or less the way the gifts will be appreciated: because they have been given with good intentions , because they exist, because they are part of a world in which one wants what one gets.
Michael Cunningham