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Dear Leonard. To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard. Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.

Michael Cunningham

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Michael Cunningham
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 6
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Cincinnati
Ohio
Love
Lasts
Life
Last
Faces
Away
Look
Leonard
Looks
Dear
Years
Face
Always
Hours

More quotes by Michael Cunningham

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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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As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.
Michael Cunningham
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Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.
Michael Cunningham
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I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself: So, this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then.
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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I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.
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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We always worry about the wrong things, don't we?
Michael Cunningham
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I have no useful theories about love and marriage.
Michael Cunningham
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I think of the people who commit these acts as children. They're in their 20s, but like certain children, they have been told only one story, over and over. Like most children, they believe in an easily identifiable good and evil, and like most children, they are capable of unthinkable cruelty.
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.
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
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a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm
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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..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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One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
Michael Cunningham
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You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.
Michael Cunningham
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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
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I just don't feel much interested in the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
Michael Cunningham
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What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. Everything is gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
Michael Cunningham