Top 180 Michael Cunningham Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Michael Cunningham

2. “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.”

— Michael Cunningham

3. “A writer should always feel like he’s in over his head.”

— Michael Cunningham

4. “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.”

— Michael Cunningham

Featured in: Romance Quotes

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

— Michael Cunningham

6. “Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you’ve made for yourself.”

— Michael Cunningham

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

— Michael Cunningham

8. “God save us from people who think they’re smarter than they actually are.”

— Michael Cunningham

9. “Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.”

— Michael Cunningham

10. “Virginia Woolf’s great novel, ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.”

— Michael Cunningham

11. “There is a beauty in the world, though it’s harsher than we expect it to be.”

— Michael Cunningham

12. “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.”

— Michael Cunningham

13. “The secret of flight is this – you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.”

— Michael Cunningham

14. “That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other.”

— Michael Cunningham

15. “Insomniacs know better than anyone how it would be to haunt a house.”

— Michael Cunningham

16. “I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act.”

— Michael Cunningham

17. “Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.”

— Michael Cunningham

18. “What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.”

— Michael Cunningham

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

— Michael Cunningham

20. “All over China, parents tell their children to stop complaining and to finish their quadratic equations and trigonometric functions because there are sixty-five million American kids going to bed with no math at all.”

— Michael Cunningham

21. “We always worry about the wrong things, don’t we?”

— Michael Cunningham

22. “A certain slightly cruel disregard for the feelings of living people is simply part of the package. I think a writer, if hes any good, is not an entirely benign entity in the world.”

— Michael Cunningham

23. “If I die tomorrow, Provincetown is where I’d want my ashes scattered. Who knows why we fall in love, with places or people, with objects or ideas? Thirty centuries of literature haven’t begun to solve the mystery; nor have they in any way slaked our interest in it. Provincetown is a mysterious place, and those of us who love it tend to do so with a peculiar, inscrutable intensity.”

— Michael Cunningham

24. “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.”

— Michael Cunningham

25. “Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It’s James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it’s Marilyn heading off to bed.”

— Michael Cunningham

26. “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.”

— Michael Cunningham

27. “Please, God, send me something to adore.”

— Michael Cunningham

28. “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 what’s already been set in motion.”

— Michael Cunningham

29. “She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.”

— Michael Cunningham

30. “Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together.”

— Michael Cunningham

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

— Michael Cunningham

32. “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.”

— Michael Cunningham

33. “Mensen zijn dom. Op een trommel slaan om een beer aan het dansen te krijgen, terwijl we de sterren zouden willen ontroeren.”

— Michael Cunningham

34. “She is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other word for it.”

— Michael Cunningham

35. “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.”

— Michael Cunningham

36. “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.”

— Michael Cunningham

37. “I seem to produce a novel approximately once every three years.”

— Michael Cunningham

38. “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.”

— Michael Cunningham

39. “Perhaps, in the extravagance of youth, we give away our devotions easily and all but arbitrarily, on the mistaken assumption that we’ll always have more to give.”

— Michael Cunningham

40. “On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it’s differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.”

— Michael Cunningham

41. “It seems good enough; parts seem very good indeed. She has lavish hopes, of course – she wants this to be her best book, the one that finally matches her expectations.”

— Michael Cunningham

42. “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

43. “Who was it who said, the worst thing you can imagine is probably what’s already happening? Shrink phrase. Not untrue, though.”

— Michael Cunningham

44. “I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.”

— Michael Cunningham

45. “I have no useful theories about love and marriage.”

— Michael Cunningham

46. “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?”

— Michael Cunningham

47. “Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I’m finishing, even if it’s turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don’t admit it, they’re not being honest.”

— Michael Cunningham

48. “There’s no denying his resemblance to the Rodin bronze – the slender, effortless muscularity of youth, the extravagant nonchalance of it; that sense that beauty is in fact the natural human condition and not the rarest of mutations.”

— Michael Cunningham

49. “Everything is infected with brightness, throbbing with it, and she prays for dark the way a wanderer lost in the desert prays for water. The world is every bit as barren of darkness as a desert is of water. There is no dark in the shuttered room, no dark behind her eyelids. There are only greater and lesser degrees of radiance. When she’s crossed over to this realm of relentless brilliance, the voices start.”

— Michael Cunningham

50. “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.”

— Michael Cunningham