Quotes by Michael Cunningham

“The only difference was one of them was trying to make a perfect cake and one of them was trying to write a great book. But if we remove that from the equation, its the same impulse and they are equally entitled to their ecstasies and their despair.”

“the worst are full of passionate intensity while the best lack all conviction.”

“Im sure there are any number of Hollywood producers who option novels and think, maybe this would make a good opera,”

“But Scott is the only one Ive met.”

“I think great poetry is enormously powerful,”

“Its like a light went off right at that moment, ... I could see my project. I knew I had something. I literally started working on it that next day.”

“People worked seven days for 12-14 hours, there was no regulation of any kind - there were no trash pick-ups, there were dead horses lying in the streets - and through all of this walked our great American whirling dervish, Walt Whitman, saying I find it all to my taste, I find it all miraculous and strange, and yes, even beautiful,”

“Like any powerful creation, can be used in a number of ways... in this book, which chronicles various dissolutions and breakages, there is still Walt Whitman, the dogged optimist.”

“We know the Bay Area will be hit by a major quake some time in the next few decades, and we are one of the top terrorist targets. Transportation around the area is hindered by (San Francisco Bay) but we can turn that into an advantage by efficient use of our ferry system.”

“It has not been given adequate funding. It lacks all of the tools it needs, so this is an effort to revive this program.”

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

One always has a better book in ones mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

Beauty is a whore, I like money better.

Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.

How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if shed tried to remain with him; if she’d returned Richards kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him, never bought the packet of incense or the alpaca coat with rose-shaped buttons. Couldn’t they have discovered something larger and stranger than what theyve got. It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens; as being full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. Thats who I was. This is who I am--a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country youve made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port.Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe its as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at the ponds edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway, and they had kissed. His mouth had opened to hers; (exciting and utterly familiar, shed never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met its own. Theyd kissed and walked around the pond together.It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissas mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and its perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissas mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and its perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

I dont think two people could have been happier than we have been.

I’m not this unusual,” she said. “It’s just my hair.”She looked at Bobby and she looked at me, with an expression at once disdainful and imploring. She was forty, pregnant, and in love with two men at once. I think what she could not abide was the zaniness of her life. Like many of us, she had grown up expecting romance to bestow dignity and direction.“Be brave,” I told her. Bobby and I stood before her, confused and homeless and lacking a plan, beset by an aching but chaotic love that refused to focus in the conventional way. Traffic roared behind us. A truck honked its hydraulic horn, a monstrous, oceanic sound. Clare shook her head, not in denial but in exasperation. Because she could think of nothing else to do, she began walking again, more slowly, toward the row of trees.

I wanted a settled life and a shocking one. Think of Van Gogh, cypress trees and church spires under a sky of writhing snakes. I was my fathers daughter. I wanted to be loved by someone like my tough judicious mother and I wanted to run screaming through the headlights with a bottle in my hand. That was the family curse. We tended to nurse flocks of undisciplined wishes that collided and canceled each other out. The curse implied that if we didnt learn to train our desires in one direction or another we were likely to end up with nothing. Look at my father and mother today.I married in my early twenties. When that went to pieces I loved a woman. At both of those times and at other times, too, I believed I had focused my impulses and embarked on a long victory over my own confusion. Now, in my late thirties, I knew less than ever about what I wanted. In place of youths belief in change I had begun to feel a nervous embarrassment that ticked inside me like a clock. Id never meant to get this far in such an unfastened condition. (p.142)

We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. Its as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if were very fortunate, by time itself. Theres 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 weve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so...