Michael Cunningham Quotes

You know, if you're hopeful, if you're even a little bit happy about something that might happen, it doesn't affect the outcome. You could still give yourself a period of optimism, even if it all falls apart.

~ Michael Cunningham

End of story. ‘Happily ever after’ fell on everyone like a guillotine’s blade.

~ Michael Cunningham

It's the solitude that slays you. Maybe because you'd expected ruin to arrive in a grander and more romantic form.

~ Michael Cunningham

Barrett is a bigger guy, not fat (not yet) but ursine, crimson of eye and lip; ginger-furred, possessed (he likes to think) of an enchanted sensual slyness, the prince transformed into wolf or lion, all slumbering large-pawed docility, awaiting, with avid yellow eyes, love’s first kiss.

~ Michael Cunningham

Here, then, is the last moment of true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on opaque water.

~ Michael Cunningham

But you find—surprise—that you like this capitulation from her, this helpless acceding, from the most recent embodiment of all the girls over all the years who've given you nothing, not even a curious glance. Welcome to the darker side of love.

~ Michael Cunningham

She could, she thinks, have entered a different life. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

~ Michael Cunningham

There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.

~ Michael Cunningham

It’s better, really, to go out in a blaze. That’s why we love Marilyn, and James Dean. We love the ones who walk right into the fire.

~ Michael Cunningham

You grow weary of being treated as the enemy simply because you are not young anymore, because you dress unexceptionally.

~ Michael Cunningham

Tyler. His handsome, lion-eyed ravagement. His capacity for devotion. Which is so sexy. Why do so many gay men lack that? Why are they so distracted, so in love with the idea of more and more and then more, again?

~ Michael Cunningham

I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.

~ Michael Cunningham

Barret thinks- he thinks, briefly- of turning around and leaving the park; of being, this time, the vanisher, the man who leaves you wondering, who offers no explanation, not even the sour satisfaction of a real fight; who simply drifts away, because (it seems) there's affection and there's sex but there's no urgency, no little hooks clasping little eyes; no binding, no dogged devotions, no prayers for mercy, not when mercy can be so easily self-administered. What would it be like, Barrett wonders, to be the other, the man who's had the modest portion he thinks of as enough, who slips away before the mess sets in, before he's available to accusation and recrimination, before the authorities start demanding of him When, and Why, and With Whom

~ Michael Cunningham

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.

~ Michael Cunningham

She pauses several treads from the bottom, listening, waiting; she is again possessed (it seems to be getting worse) by a dream-like feeling, as if she is standing in the wings, about to go onstage and perform in a play for which she is not appropriately dressed, and for which she has not adequately rehearsed.

~ Michael Cunningham

This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining.

~ Michael Cunningham

He could see himself selling himself as a compelling mutation, a young god, proud to the point of sexy arrogance of his anatomical deviation: ninety percent thriving muscled man-flesh and ten percent glorious blindingly white angel

~ Michael Cunningham

It’s the country that would have him, since he lacked the necessary papers for more promising places.

~ Michael Cunningham