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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
World
Grateful
Live
Trying

More quotes by 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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One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
Michael Cunningham
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Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?
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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It's the world, you live in it, even if some boy has made a fool of you.
Michael Cunningham
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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.
Michael Cunningham
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a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm
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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..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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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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Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.
Michael Cunningham
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As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.
Michael Cunningham
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I seem to produce a novel approximately once every three years.
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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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 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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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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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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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?
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