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Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it's Marilyn heading off to bed.

Michael Cunningham

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Michael Cunningham
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 6
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Cincinnati
Ohio
Tragedy
Marilyn
Youth
Heading
Headings
Dean
Jumping
James
Sexy
Bed

More quotes by 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?
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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.
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Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself.
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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.
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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.
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we become the stories we tell ourselves
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As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.
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a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm
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Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.
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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.
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Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.
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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.
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It's the world, you live in it, even if some boy has made a fool of you.
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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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The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.
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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.
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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.
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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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Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?
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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