Michael Cunningham Quotes

Beauty is a whore, I like money better.

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

I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.

This, Barrett Meeks, is your work. You witness, and compile. You persevere.

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

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

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.

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

I see myself..in those pages as she goes back and forth, enjoying simply enjoying the beauties of the moments then chastising herself for having ‘no edge’ being simple and worse, harmless.

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

There is a beauty in the world, though it's 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.

The point of sex is...
Sex doesn't 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.

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.

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

Women are kind of screwed, in the world,” Andrew says.