β
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (A Home at the End of the World)
β
The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (A Home at the End of the World)
β
One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
β
β
Michael Cunningham
β
Beauty is a whore, I like money better.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
Dear Leonard. To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard. Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
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.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
I remember one morning getting up at dawn. There was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling. And I... 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...never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment, right then.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. And there it is... It was death. I chose life.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
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. It's 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 we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's 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 we've 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...
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
we become the stories we tell ourselves
β
β
Michael Cunningham (A Home at the End of the World)
β
Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
She is, above all else, tired; she wants more than anything to return to her bed and her book. The world, this world, feels suddenly stunned and stunted, far from everything.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
I don't have any regrets, really, except that one. I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
Perhaps, in the extravagance of youth, we give away our devotions easily and all but arbitrarily, on the mistaken assumption that weβll always have more to give.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (A Home at the End of the World)
β
There is 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 we've ever imagined , though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows 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.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (A Home at the End of the World)
β
There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted something alive and shocking enough that it could be a morning in somebody's life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
She will remain sane and she will live as she was meant to live, richly and deeply, among others of her kind, in full possession and command of her gifts.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
Insomniacs know better than anyone how it would be to haunt a house.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (By Nightfall)
β
A stray fact: insects are not drawn to candle flames, they are drawn to the light on the far side of the flame, they go into the flame and sizzle to nothingness because they're so eager to get to the light on the other side.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (By Nightfall)
β
She is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other word for it.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
I feel like there's something terrible and wonderful and amazing that's just beyond my grasp. I have dreams about it. I do dream, by the way. It hovers over me at odd moments. And then it's gone. I feel like I'm always on the brink of something that never arrives. I want to either have it or be free of it.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (Specimen Days)
β
He insists on a version of you that is funnier, stranger, more eccentric and profound than you suspect yourself to be--capable of doing more good and more harm in the world than you've ever imagined--it is all but impossible not to believe, at least in his presence and a while after you've left him, that he alone sees through your essence, weighs your true qualities . . . and appreciates you more fully than anyone else ever has.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
...and when somebody comes up to me with big hair and gobs of makeup on and says, 'Can I help you,' it's all I can do not to scream, 'Bitch, you can't even help yourself.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
Please, God, send me something to adore.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (By Nightfall)
β
What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story?
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β
Michael Cunningham (By Nightfall)
β
Weβd hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (A Home at the End of the World)
β
A writer should always feel like he's in over his head
β
β
Michael Cunningham
β
. . . he felt himself entering a moment so real he could only run toward it, shouting.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (Flesh and Blood)
β
Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
She wants to have baked a cake that banishes sorrow, even if only for a little while.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
People are more than you think they are. And theyβre less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Snow Queen)
β
Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it's Marilyn heading off to bed.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (By Nightfall)
β
We always worry about the wrong things, don't we?
β
β
Michael Cunningham (By Nightfall)
β
We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep - it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's 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 we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows 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.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
Thereβs 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 weβve ever imagined.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
She thinks how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in gestures and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
I don't know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that."
"You don't have to go to the party. You don't have to go to the ceremony. You don't have to do anything at all."
"But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me & incredibly good. I want to say that - everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has 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.
β
β
Michael Cunningham
β
I am beginning to understand the true difference between youth and age. Young people have time to make plans and think of new ideas. Older people need their whole energy to keep up with whatβs already been set in motion.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (A Home at the End of the World)
β
Most of us are safe. If you're not a delirious dream the gods are having, if your beauty doesn't trouble the constellations, nobody's going to cast a spell on you.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (A Wild Swan: And Other Tales)
β
We'd hoped vaguely to fall in love but hadn't worried much about it, because we'd thought we had all the time in the world. Love had seemed so final and so dull -- love was what ruined our parents. Love had delivered them to a life of mortgage payments and household repairs; to unglamorous jobs and the flourescent aisles of a supermarket at two in the afternoon. We'd hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves. It sounded possible. If we didn't rush or grab, if we didn't panic, a love both challenging and nurturing might appear. If the person was imaginable, then the person could exist.
β
β
Michael Cunningham
β
You live with the threat of my extinction. I live with it too.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
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?
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β
Michael Cunningham (By Nightfall)
β
I'm talking about a little truth-in-packaging here. To be perfectly frank, you don't quite look like yourself. And if you walk around looking like someone other than who you are, you could end up getting the wrong job, the wrong friends, who knows what-all. You could end up with somebody else's life."
I shrugged again, and smiled. "This is my life," I said. "It doesn't seem like the wrong one.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (A Home at the End of the World)
β
How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him; if sheβd returned Richard's 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. Couldnβt they have discovered something larger and stranger than what they've 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. That's 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 you've 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 it's as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at the pond's 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, she'd never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met its own. They'd 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 Clarissa's 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 it's 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.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
Oh, Mrs. Dalloway. Always giving parties to cover the silence.
β
β
Michael Cunningham
β
Here is what unsayable about us: Jonathan and I are members of a team so old nobody else could join even if we wanted them to. What binds us is stronger than sex. It is stronger than love. We're related. Each of us is the other born into a different flesh.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (A Home at the End of the World)
β
There are times when you don't belong and you think you're going to kill yourself. Once I went to a hotel. Later that night I made a plan. The plan was I would leave my family when my second child was born. And that's what I did. I got up one morning, made breakfast, went to the bus stop, got on a bus. I'd left a note. I got a job in a library in Canada. It would be wonderful to say you regretted it. It would be easy. But what does it mean? What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. There it is. No-one's going to forgive me. It was death. I chose life." -Laura Brown-
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
The point of sex is...
Sex doesn't have a point.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (By Nightfall)
β
She lays the book face down on her chest. Already her bedroom (no, their bedroom) feels more densely inhabited, more actual, because a character named Mrs. Dalloway is on her way to buy flowers.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's 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 we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds & expectations, to burst open & give us everything we've 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.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
...sanity involves a certain measure of impersonation, not simply for the benefit of husband and servants but for the sake, first and foremost, of one's own convictions.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
Right now she is reading Virginia Woolf, all of Virginia Woolf, book by book-She is fascinated by the idea of a woman like that, a woman of such brilliance, such strangeness, such immeasurable sorrow; a woman who had genius but still filled her pocket with a stone and waded out into a river.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
She'd never imagined it like this-when she thought of someone (a woman like herself)losing her mind, she'd imagined shrieks and wails, hallucinations; but at that moment it had seemed clear that there was another way, far quieter; a way that was numb and hopeless, flat, so much so that an emotion as strong as sorrow would have been a relief.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
It's hardly ever the destination we've been anticipating, is it? Our hopes may seem unrealized, but we were in all likelihood hoping for the wrong thing. Where did we - the species, that is - pick up that strange and perverse habit?
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Snow Queen)
β
..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.
β
β
Michael Cunningham
β
Clarissa will be bereaved, deeply lonely, but she will not die. She will be too much in love with life, with London. Virginia imagines someone else, yes, someone strong of body but frail-minded; someone with a touch of genius, of poetry, ground under by the wheels of the world, by war and government, by doctors; a someone who is, technically speaking insane, because that person sees meaning everywhere, knows that trees are sentient beings and sparrows sing in Greek. Yes, someone like that. Clarissa, sane Clarissa -exultant, ordinary Clarissa - will go on, loving London, loving her life of ordinary pleasures, and someone else, a deranged poet, a visonary, will be the one to die.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
Like the morning you walked out of that old house, when you were eighteen and I was, well, I had just turned nineteen, hadn't I? I was a nineteen-year-old and I was in love with Louis and I was in love with you, and I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful as the sight of you walking out a glass door in the early morning, still sleepy, in your underwear. Isn't it strange?
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
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.
β
β
Michael Cunningham
β
He wanted to tell her that he was inspired and vigilant and recklessly alone, that his body contained his unsteady heart and something else, something he felt but could not describe: porous and spiky, shifting with flecks of thought, with urge and memory; salted with brightness, flickerings of white and green and pale gold; something that loved stars because it was made of the same substance.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (Specimen Days)
β
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--it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
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 Clarissa's 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.
β
β
Michael Cunningham
β
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.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (A Home at the End of the World)
β
He says, 'I don't know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that.'
'You don't have to go to the party. You don't have to go to the ceremony. You don't have to do anything at all.'
'But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and then you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
What marriage doesn't involve uncountable accretions, a language of gestures, a sense of recognition sharp as a toothache? Unhappy, sure. What couple isn't unhappy, at least part of the time? But how can the divorce rate be, as they say, skyrocketing? How miserable would you have to get to be able to bear the actual separation, to go off and live your life so utterly unrecognized?
β
β
Michael Cunningham (By Nightfall)
β
She knew she was going to have trouble believing in herself, in the room of her house, and when she glanced over at this new book on her nightstand, stacked atop the one she finished last night, she reached for it automatically, as if reading were the singular and obvious first task of the day, the only viable way to negotiate the transit from sleep to obligation.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
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.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (A Home at the End of the World)
β
Yes," she answers and does not move. She might, at this moment, be nothing but a floating intelligence; not even a brain inside a skull, just a presence that perceives, as a ghoast might. Yes, she thinks, this is probably how it must feel to be a ghost. It's a little like reading, isn't it-that same sensation of knowing people, settings, situations, without playing any particular part beyond that of the willing observer.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences, though it runs like veins of brilliant metal through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance
β
β
Michael Cunningham
β
Peter glances out at the falling snow. Oh, little man. You have brought down your house not through passion but by neglect. You who dared to think of yourself as dangerous. You are guilty not of the epic transgressions but the tiny crimes. You have failed in the most base and human of ways - you have not imagined the lives of others.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (By Nightfall)
β
Oh, pride, pride. I was so wrong. It defeated me. It simply proved insurmountable. There was so much, oh, far too much for me. I mean, there's the weather, there's the water and the land, there are the animals, and the buildings, and the past and the future, there's space, there's history. There's this thread or something caught between my teeth, there's the old woman across the way, did you notice she switched the donkey and the squirrel on her windowsill? And, of course, there's time. And place. And there's you, Mrs. D. I wanted to tell part of the story of part of you. Oh, I'd love to have done that."
"Richard. You wrote a whole book."
"But everything's left out of it, almost everything. And then I just stuck on a shock ending. Oh, now, I'm not looking for sympathy, really. We want so much, don't we?"
"Yes. I suppose we do."
"You kissed me beside a pond."
"Ten thousand years ago."
"It's still happening.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
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; and even the sex, once she and Richard reached that point, was ardent but awkward, unsatisfying, ore kindly than passionate. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's ind 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 it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the tie, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
The kiss was innocent--innocent enough--but it was also full of something not unlike what Virginia wants from London, from life; it was full of a love complex and ravenous, ancient, neither this nor that. It will serve as this afternoon's manifestation of the central mystery itself, the elusive brightness that shines from the edges of certain dreams; the brightness which, when we awaken, is already fading from our minds, and which we rise in the hope of finding, perhaps today, this new day in which anything might happen, anything at all.
β
β
Michael Cunningham
β
Maybe itβs not, in the end, the virtues of others that so wrenches our hearts as it is the sense of almost unbearably poignant recognition when we see them at their most base, in their sorrow and gluttony and foolishness. You need the virtues, tooβsome sort of virtuesβbut we donβt care about Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina or Raskolnikov because theyβre good. We care about them because theyβre not admirable, because theyβre us, and because great writers have forgiven them for it.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (By Nightfall)
β
I was living my own future and my brother's 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.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (A Home at the End of the World)
β
She, Laura, likes to imagine (it's one of her most closely held secrets) that she has a touch of brilliance herself, just a hint of it, though she knows most people probably walk around with similar hopeful suspicions curled up like tiny fists inside them, never divulged. She wonders, while she pushes a cart through the supermarket or has her hair done, it the other women aren't all thinking, to some degree or other, the same thing: Here is the brilliant spirit, the woman of sorrows, the woman of transcendent joys, who would rather be elsewhere, who has consented to perform simple and essentially foolish tasks, to examine tomatoes, to sit under a hair dryer, because it is her art and her duty.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
β
He believes that a real work of art can be owned but should not be subject to capture; that it should radiate such authority, such bizarre but confident beauty (or unbeauty) that it can't be undone by even the most ludicrous sofas or side tables. A real work of art should rule the room, and the clients should call up not to complain about the art but to say that the art has helped them understand how the room is all a horrible mistake, can Peter suggest a designer to help them start over again.
β
β
Michael Cunningham (By Nightfall)
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One often feels exalted, expanded, in his presence. He is not one of those egotists who miniaturize others. He is the opposite kind of egotist, driven by grandiosity rather than greed, and if he insists on a version of you that is funnier, stranger, more eccentric and profound than you suspect yourself to be--capable of doing more good and more harm in the world than you've ever imagined--it is all but impossible not to believe, at least in his presence and for a while after you've left him that he alone sees through to your essence, weighs your true qualities (not all of which are necessarily flattering--a certain clumsy, childish rudeness is part of his style), and appreciates you more fully than anyone else ever has.
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Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
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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. "There's not a thing in this pretty world to be afraid of. I'm 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.
"I'm here," Carlton says again, and he is.
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Michael Cunningham (A Home at the End of the World)
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Iβm not this unusual,β she said. βItβs just my hair.β
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.
βBe brave,β 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.
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Michael Cunningham (A Home at the End of the World)
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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 father's 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 didn't 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 youth's belief in change I had begun to feel a nervous embarrassment that ticked inside me like a clock. I'd never meant to get this far in such an unfastened condition. (p.142)
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Michael Cunningham (A Home at the End of the World)
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She's had a long life. Now she's going to the Lord."
"Frankly it creeps me out a little when you say things like that," Simon said.
"It shouldn't. If you don't like 'Lord,' pick another word. She's going home. She's 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?"
"That's 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. It's an ecstatic release we're physically unable to apprehend while we're in our bodies. Orgasm is our best hint, but it's crude and minor by comparison.
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Michael Cunningham (Specimen Days)