Quote

Perhaps, in the extravagance of youth, we give away our devotions easily and all but arbitrarily, on the mistaken assumption that we’ll always have more to give.

Michael Cunningham

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Michael Cunningham
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 6
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Cincinnati
Ohio
Away
Arbitrarily
Give
Extravagance
Giving
Mistaken
Always
Assumption
Devotion
Easily
Youth
Perhaps
Devotions

More quotes by Michael Cunningham

Image
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
Image
It's the world, you live in it, even if some boy has made a fool of you.
Michael Cunningham
Image
..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
Image
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
Image
we become the stories we tell ourselves
Michael Cunningham
Image
Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?
Michael Cunningham
Image
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
Image
Please, God, send me something to adore.
Michael Cunningham
Image
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
Image
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?
Michael Cunningham
Image
These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect everybody's little display of genius.
Michael Cunningham
Image
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
Image
One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
Michael Cunningham
Image
I have no useful theories about love and marriage.
Michael Cunningham
Image
Accept that, like many men, you have a streak of the homoerotic in you. Why would you, why would anyone, want to be that straight?
Michael Cunningham
Image
I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
Michael Cunningham
Image
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
Image
You can't find peace by avoiding life.
Michael Cunningham
Image
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
Image
. . . he felt himself entering a moment so real he could only run toward it, shouting.
Michael Cunningham