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Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.

Michael Cunningham

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Michael Cunningham
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 6
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Cincinnati
Ohio
Grateful
Live
Trying
World

More quotes by 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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We always worry about the wrong things, don't we?
Michael Cunningham
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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.
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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a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm
Michael Cunningham
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I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.
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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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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Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself.
Michael Cunningham
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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.
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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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.
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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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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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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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?
Michael Cunningham
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Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.
Michael Cunningham
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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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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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Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?
Michael Cunningham