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Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?

Michael Cunningham

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Michael Cunningham
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 6
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Cincinnati
Ohio
Mystery
Deep
Wants
Particular
Understand
Every
Love

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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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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Please, God, send me something to adore.
Michael Cunningham
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You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.
Michael Cunningham
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What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.
Michael Cunningham
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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.
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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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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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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The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.
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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Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.
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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..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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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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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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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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This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.
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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I just don't feel much interested in the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
Michael Cunningham