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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

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Michael Cunningham
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 6
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Cincinnati
Ohio
Good
Saved
Think
Patient
Thinking
Goodness
Life
Longer
Spoiling
People
Gone
Happier
Happiness
Incredibly
Two
Certainty
Everything
Entirely

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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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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I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
Michael Cunningham
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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
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we become the stories we tell ourselves
Michael Cunningham
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A certain slightly cruel disregard for the feelings of living people is simply part of the package. I think a writer, if hes any good, is not an entirely benign entity in the world.
Michael Cunningham
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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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One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
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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This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.
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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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 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.
Michael Cunningham
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Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write.
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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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.
Michael Cunningham
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You can't find peace by avoiding life.
Michael Cunningham
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We always worry about the wrong things, don't we?
Michael Cunningham
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It's the world, you live in it, even if some boy has made a fool of you.
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