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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

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Michael Cunningham
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 6
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Cincinnati
Ohio
Ideas
Human
Humans
Different
Forgave
Kind
Grander
Love
Frailty
Hoped
Knew

More quotes by Michael Cunningham

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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.
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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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I just don't feel much interested in the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
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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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we become the stories we tell ourselves
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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.
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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.
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This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.
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I seem to produce a novel approximately once every three years.
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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?
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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 is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.
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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.
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I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.
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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.
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One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
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I have no useful theories about love and marriage.
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.
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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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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