I feel like there's something terrible and wonderful and amazing that's just beyond my grasp. I have dreams about it. I do dream, by the way. It hovers over me at odd moments. And then it's gone. I feel like I'm always on the brink of something that never arrives. I want to either have it or be free of it.
Michael CunninghamShe 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 CunninghamIf she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences, though it runs like veins of brilliant metal through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance
Michael CunninghamMaybe itโs not, in the end, the virtues of others that so wrenches our hearts as it is the sense of almost unbearably poignant recognition when we see them at their most base, in their sorrow and gluttony and foolishness. You need the virtues, tooโsome sort of virtuesโbut we donโt care about Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina or Raskolnikov because theyโre good. We care about them because theyโre not admirable, because theyโre us, and because great writers have forgiven them for it.
Michael Cunningham