Michael Cunningham

Writer

1952-11-06

Quotes by Michael Cunningham

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.
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Here's the sting of livingness. He's back after his nightly voyage of sleep, all clarity and purpose; he's 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.
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The point of sex is... Sex doesn't have a point.
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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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Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.
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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 don't 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 couldn't say it.That some god or goddess heard him, one time too many, getting panicky about whether she'd been carjacked at the mall, or had, like, hair cancer . . .That they delivered the think even he couldn't imagine worrying about.It's not true.I know.But we're 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. It's been way too long.
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He needs a looser association. He needs something that implies a man who wants the ice shard to remain in his chest, who's learned to love the sensation of being pierced.
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I was not beautiful, but I believed I had the possibility of beauty in me.
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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.
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There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.
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...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.
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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.
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There were no weapons of mass destruction. And we bombed them anyway.And, by the way he's destroyed the economy. He's squandered something in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars. It seems impossible to Tyler that that might not matter. It drives him insane.
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What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half.
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You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.
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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.
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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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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.
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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...
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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.
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