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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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Michael Cunningham
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 6
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Cincinnati
Ohio
Everything
Seem
Giving
Open
Hours
Burst
Lives
Consolation
Inspirational
Imagined
Seems
Odds
Give
Expectations
Ever
Hour

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.
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a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm
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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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The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.
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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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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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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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You can't find peace by avoiding life.
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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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As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.
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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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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.
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I just don't feel much interested in the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
Michael Cunningham