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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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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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a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm
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.
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 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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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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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 suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.
Michael Cunningham
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Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.
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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Please, God, send me something to adore.
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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On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.
Michael Cunningham
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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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we become the stories we tell ourselves
Michael Cunningham
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I seem to produce a novel approximately once every three years.
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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One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
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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You can't find peace by avoiding life.
Michael Cunningham