Top 180 Michael Cunningham Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 4 of 4

151. “I think pretty much everybody who says he needs money really and truly needs money.”

— Michael Cunningham

152. “There is so little love in the world.”

— Michael Cunningham

153. “She is not given to fawning over celebrities, no more than most people, but can’t help being drawn to the aura of fame – and more than fame, actual immortality – implied by the presence of a movie star in a trailer.”

— Michael Cunningham

154. “Most people think they’re not most people.”

— Michael Cunningham

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

— Michael Cunningham

156. “It’s remarkable, being alive. Being, once again, someone walking through a dust of blowing snow, passing the window of the liquor store, which offers an array of bottles surrounded by tiny blinking lights,; seeing her own reflection skim across the glass; being, once again, able to recieve the ordinary pleasures, boots on the pavement, hands in the pockets of her jacket...”

— Michael Cunningham

157. “I’ve stayed alive for you. But now you have to let me go.”

— Michael Cunningham

158. “Superstitions are a comfort sometimes, I don’t know why you so adamantly refuse all comforts.”

— Michael Cunningham

159. “Cassandra wanted the same night over and over again but she believed in some hidden way that if she had the same night enough times it would all crack open, and something better than love would be revealed. Something better than music.”

— Michael Cunningham

160. “This, Barrett Meeks, is your work. You witness, and compile. You persevere.”

— Michael Cunningham

161. “What you are, more than anything, is alive.”

— Michael Cunningham

162. “I’ve always maintained you can either cure your neuroses or you can just outwait them.”

— Michael Cunningham

163. “I know you. I’ve seen it. And, knowing all, I release you.”

— Michael Cunningham

164. “I had blundered again, obscurely, and rather than go on worrying over my behavior, I decided to just give in and dislike Alice.”

— Michael Cunningham

165. “This is one of the most singular experiences, waking on what feels like a good day, preparing to work but not yet actually embarked. At this moment there are infinite possibilities, whole hours ahead.”

— Michael Cunningham

166. “His father had a merciless eye that could find one bad straw in ten bales of good intentions.”

— Michael Cunningham

167. “You don’t have to matter any more than you do right now.”

— Michael Cunningham

168. “Barrett lingers awhile. He’s not eager to relinquish the strange pleasure of sitting in the green chair, surrounded by the ever-diminishing offerings that had, just yesterday, been daily articles, watching the apartment disappear, piece by piece.”

— Michael Cunningham

169. “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.”

— Michael Cunningham

170. “It’s remarkable, being alive. Being, once again, someone walking through a dust of blowing snow...”

— Michael Cunningham

171. “She wanted this. She wanted the marriage. She wanted the kids. She wanted the place in Brooklyn, refused to worry overmuch about the mortgage payments. She wanted the job, too. She was good at it. She strove. She outperformed others. The trick now, it seems, is to keep wanting it, the job as well as the marriage, motherhood, the stratospherically costly handbag. The trick is learning not to despise herself for her claustrophobia and disappointment.”

— Michael Cunningham

172. “She wants to be loved. She wants to be a competent mother reading calmly to her child; she wants to be a wife who sets a perfect table. She does not want, not at all, to be the strange woman, the pathetic creature, full of quirks and rages, solitary, sulking, tolerated but not loved.”

— Michael Cunningham

173. “Again, always, the fundamental question: are you protecting your children or are you sowing the seeds of what will prove to be a lifetime of mistrust?”

— Michael Cunningham

174. “All my life I could do anything. I could do anything, really. Except the one thing I wanted.”

— Michael Cunningham

175. “For years, for most of my recollected life, I’d walked carefully over a subterranean well of boredom and hopelessness that lay just beneath the thin outer layer of my imagination. If I’d stood still too long, if I’d given in to repose, I’d have fallen through. So I’d made things, gone to clubs and movies. I’d kept changing my hair.”

— Michael Cunningham

176. “Dan extinguishes the ignition and turns off the headlights. The house looks more charming, less shabby, and desolate in this purplish semi-dark. The house could be a life-size version of a model railroad house in which human beings can miraculously live among trees made of styrofoam behind opaque windows that are simply rectangles of yellow-tinted light glowing on a train table in somebody’s basement.”

— Michael Cunningham

177. “Yes, she thinks, this 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.”

— Michael Cunningham

178. “I admit it – there was a streak of sadism in my lusts. There was the taint of vanity. I choose ordinary men who would not refuse; who would feel lucky to have me. I did not thrill to the sight of their flesh – which was either bulky or scrawny but always abashed and grateful – so much as I did to the fact of their capture.”

— Michael Cunningham

179. “Do you think we ever really survive our childhoods?”

— Michael Cunningham

180. “He demands that his mother pick him up so he can see the soldiers better; so he will be more visible to them. All this enters the bridge, resounds through its wood and stone, and enters Virginia’s body. Her face, pressed sideways to the piling, absorbs it all: the truck and the soldiers, the mother and the child.”

— Michael Cunningham

181. “She is better, she is safer, if she rests in Richmond; if she does not speak too much, write too much, feel too much; if she does not travel impetuously to London and walk through its streets; and yet she is dying this way, she is gently dying on a bed of roses.”

— Michael Cunningham

182. “Here they are, this once-prosperous couple, shocked, altered, dragged before the seat of the conqueror who’d promised it was only the servants and petty thieves who’d suffer.”

— Michael Cunningham

183. “Still, there is this terrible desire to be loved. Still, there is this horror at being left behind.”

— Michael Cunningham

184. “Barrett strokes one of the chair’s slick, bile-green arms. “You can get attached to just about anything, can’t you?” he says.”

— Michael Cunningham

185. “She’d never been religious. She hadn’t allowed grief to send her crawling to the church.”

— Michael Cunningham

186. “You’re beautiful in your own skin. You brought with you into the world some kind of human amazingness, and you can depend on it, always. Please try not to ever let anybody talk you out of that.”

— Michael Cunningham