Top 180 Michael Cunningham Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Love is deep, a mystery – who wants to understand its every particular?”

— Michael Cunningham

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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.”

— Michael Cunningham

55. “Virginia Woolf came along in the early part of the century and essentially said through her writing, yes, big books can be written about the traditional big subjects. There is war. There is the search for God. These are all very important things.”

— Michael Cunningham

56. “Do we ever give anyone the gift they actually want?”

— Michael Cunningham

57. “Love, it seems, arrives not only unannounced, but so accidentally, so randomly, as to make you wonder why you, why anyone, believes even fleetingly in laws of cause and effect.”

— Michael Cunningham

58. “She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric.”

— Michael Cunningham

59. “Sure, go ahead, simulate life, using only ink and paper.”

— Michael Cunningham

60. “It’s remarkable, being alive.”

— Michael Cunningham

61. “What do you do when you’re no longer the hero of your own story?”

— Michael Cunningham

62. “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.”

— Michael Cunningham

63. “Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear.”

— Michael Cunningham

64. “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.”

— Michael Cunningham

65. “Beauty – the beauty Peter craves – is this, then: a human bundle of accidental grace and doom and hope. Mizzy must have hope, he must, he wouldn’t shine like this if he were in true despair, and of course he’s young, who in this world despairs more exquisitely than the young, it’s something the old tend to forget.”

— Michael Cunningham

66. “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.”

— Michael Cunningham

67. “Oh, all you immigrants and visionaries, what do you hope to find here, who do you hope to become?”

— Michael Cunningham

68. “Welcome to the darker side of love.”

— Michael Cunningham

69. “That summer when she was eighteen, it seemed anything could happen, anything at all.”

— Michael Cunningham

70. “She doesn’t really want to go far, she just wants the solitude, the public solitude, of the street; the un-company of passing strangers, no one embracing her, no one looking with compassion and wonder into her eyes, no one marvelling at her.”

— Michael Cunningham

71. “He’s filled with a sense of childish release, the old feeling that because you are sick, all your trials and obligations have been suspended.”

— Michael Cunningham

72. “There’s no comfort, it seems, in the world of objects.”

— Michael Cunningham

73. “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

74. “And maybe – maybe – love will arrive, and remain.”

— Michael Cunningham

75. “But magic is sometimes all about knowing where the secret door is, and how to open it. With that, you’re gone.”

— Michael Cunningham

76. “The vestibule door opens onto a June morning so fine and scrubbed Classira pauses at the threshold as she would at the edge of a pool, watching the turquoise water lapping at the tiles, the liquid nets of sun wavering in the blue depths. As if standing at the edge of a pool she delays for a moment the plunge, the quick membrane of chill, the plain shock of immersion.”

— Michael Cunningham

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

— Michael Cunningham

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

— Michael Cunningham

79. “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.”

— Michael Cunningham

80. “I know a conquistador when I see one. I know all about making a splash. It isn’t hard. If you shout loud enough, for long enough, a crowd will gather to see what all the noise is about. It’s the nature of crowds. They don’t stay long, unless you give them reason.”

— Michael Cunningham

81. “If you’ve really loved a book, or a movie for that matter, really loved it, what you want is that same book again, but as if you’ve never read it. And when you get something unfamiliar, you feel betrayed.”

— Michael Cunningham

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

— Michael Cunningham

83. “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?”

— Michael Cunningham

84. “She simply does what her daughter tells her to, and finds a surprising relief in it. Maybe, she thinks, one could begin dying into this: the ministrations of a grown daughter, the comforts of a room. Here, then, is age. Here are the little consolations, the lamp and the book. Here is the world, increasingly managed by people who are not you; who will do either well or badly; who do not look at you when they pass you in the street.”

— Michael Cunningham

85. “It’s the world, you live in it, even if some boy has made a fool of you.”

— Michael Cunningham

86. “Who knows what succession of girls and boys sneak in through the sliding glass doors at night, after the mother has sunk to the bottom of her own private lake, with the help of Absolut and Klonopin?”

— Michael Cunningham

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

— Michael Cunningham

88. “She has failed. She wishes she didn’t mind. Something, she thinks, is wrong with her.”

— Michael Cunningham

89. “People are more than you think they are. And they’re less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.”

— Michael Cunningham

90. “There’s the appeal of the young thief who robs you, and climbs back down off your cloud. It’s possible to love that boy, in a wistful and hopeless way. It’s possible to love his greed and narcissism, to grant him that which is beyond your own capacities: heedlessness, cockiness, a self-devotion so pure it borders on the divine.”

— Michael Cunningham

91. “Men may congratulate themselves for writing truly and passionately about the movements of nations; they may consider war and the search for God to be great literature’s only subjects; but if men’s standing in the world could be toppled by an ill-advised choice of hat, English literature would be dramatically changed.”

— Michael Cunningham

92. “I think of the people who commit these acts as children. They’re in their 20s, but like certain children, they have been told only one story, over and over. Like most children, they believe in an easily identifiable good and evil, and like most children, they are capable of unthinkable cruelty.”

— Michael Cunningham

93. “One of the troubles with love is, you can’t talk about it without feeling like you keep cueing old songs.”

— Michael Cunningham

94. “It seems that she can survive, she can prosper, if she has London around her.”

— Michael Cunningham

95. “There is no one there to see it. The world is doing what it always does, demonstrating itself to itself. The world has no interest in the little figures that come and go, the phantoms that worry and worship, that rake the graveled paths and erect the occasional rock garden, the bronze boy-man, the hammered cup for snow to fall into.”

— Michael Cunningham

96. “Maybe – let’s not rule it out – this will be the song that cuts clean, the one that matters, the one that sheds standard-issue romance and reveals, under its old skin, a raw blood-red devotion deeper than comfort, a desire profounder than schoolboy satisfaction, a yearning cold and immaculate and unstoppable as snow.”

— Michael Cunningham

97. “Who has more power than a child? She can be as cruel as she wants to be. He can’t.”

— Michael Cunningham

98. “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.”

— Michael Cunningham

99. “Most of us can be counted on to manage our own undoings.”

— Michael Cunningham

100. “I just don’t feel much interested in the lifestyles of the rich and famous.”

— Michael Cunningham