Quotes by Michael Cunningham

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 & expectations, to burst open & 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.

Man, he said, Im 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.

Shes had a long life. Now shes going to the Lord. Frankly it creeps me out a little when you say things like that, Simon said. It shouldnt. If you dont like Lord, pick another word. Shes going home. Shes going back to the party. Whatever you like. I suppose you have some definite ideas about an afterlife. Sure. We get reabsorbed into the earthly and celestial mechanism. No heaven? Thats heaven. What about realms of glory? What about walking around in golden slippers? We abandon consciousness as if we were waking from a bad dream. We throw it off like clothes that never fit us right. Its an ecstatic release were physically unable to apprehend while were in our bodies. Orgasm is our best hint, but its crude and minor by comparison.

I was living my own future and my brothers lost one as well. I represented him here just as he represented me there, in some unguessable other place. His move from life to death might resemble my stepping into the kitchen - into its soft nowhere quality and foggy hum. I breathed the dark air. If I had at that moment a sense of calm kindly death while my heart beat and my lungs expanded, he might know a similar sense of life in the middle of his ongoing death.

You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.

What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joys other half.

There were no weapons of mass destruction. And we bombed them anyway.And, by the way hes destroyed the economy. Hes squandered something in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars. It seems impossible to Tyler that that might not matter. It drives him insane.

I suppose at heart it was the haircut that did it; that exploded the ordinary order of things and showed me the possibilities that had been there all along, hidden among the patterns in the wallpaper. In a different age, we used to take acid for more or less the same reason.

There is a beauty in the world, though its harsher than we expect it to be.

Julian is bluff and sturdy, royal; he possesses a gracefully muscular, equine beauty so natural it suggests that beauty itself is a fundamental human condition and not a mutation in the general design.

...a much younger woman, one of those round-faced, tiny-featured women who were touted as beauties though they were not in fact particularly beautiful. They were simply the daughters of wealthy families powerful enough to demand that the concept of beauty be expanded to include them.

I was not beautiful, but I believed I had the possibility of beauty in me.

He needs a looser association. He needs something that implies a man who wants the ice shard to remain in his chest, whos learned to love the sensation of being pierced.

Do you ever think?What?They were lying together on the sofa that had always been there, the crappy beat-up biscuit-colored sofa that was managing, as best it could, its promotion from threadbare junk to holy artifact.You know.What if I dont know?You fucking do.Okay, yeah. Yes. I, too, wonder if Dad worried so much about every single little goddamned thing . . . That he summoned it.Thanks. I couldnt say it.That some god or goddess heard him, one time too many, getting panicky about whether shed been carjacked at the mall, or had, like, hair cancer . . .That they delivered the think even he couldnt imagine worrying about.Its not true.I know.But were both thinking about it. That may have been their betrothal. That may have been when they took their vows: We are no longer siblings, we are mates, starship survivors, a two-man crew wandering the crags and crevices of a planet that may not be inhabited by anyone but us. We no longer need, or want, a father. Still, they really have to call him. Its been way too long.

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

How are you feeling, man? he asks me.Great, I tell him, and it is purely the truth. Doves clatter up out of a bare tree and turn at the same instant, transforming themselves from steel to silver in the snow-blown light. I know at that moment that the drug is working. Everything before me has become suddenly, radiantly itself. How could Carlton have known this was about to happen? Oh, I whisper. His hand settles on my shoulder.Stay loose, Frisco, he says. Theres not a thing in this pretty world to be afraid of. Im here.I am not afraid. I am astonished. I had not realized until this moment how real everything is. A twig lies on the marble at my feet, bearing a cluster of hard brown berries. The broken-off end is raw, white, fleshly. Trees are alive.Im here, Carlton says again, and he is.

The point of sex is... Sex doesnt have a point.

We worship numberless gods or idols, but we all need to be the grandest possible versions of ourselves, we need to walk across the face of the earth with as much grace and beauty as we can muster before we’re wrapped in our winding sheets, and returned.

Heres the sting of livingness. Hes back after his nightly voyage of sleep, all clarity and purpose; hes renewed his citizenship in the world of people who strive and connect, people who mean business, people who burn and want, who remember everything, who walk lucid and unafraid.

This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.