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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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Michael Cunningham
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 6
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Cincinnati
Ohio
Make
Material
Materials
Hand
Future
Hands

More quotes by 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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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
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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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Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.
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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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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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.
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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The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.
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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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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Please, God, send me something to adore.
Michael Cunningham
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We always worry about the wrong things, don't we?
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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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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..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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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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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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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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One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
Michael Cunningham