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 CunninghamYou grow weary of being treated as the enemy simply because you are not young anymore; because you dress unexceptionally.
Michael CunninghamVirginia 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 CunninghamThis is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.
Michael CunninghamI 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 CunninghamHe insists on a version of you that is funnier, stranger, more eccentric and prfound thatn you suspect yourself to be--capable of doing more good and more harm in the world than you've ever imagined--it is all but impossible not to believe, at least in his presence and a while after you've left him, that he alone sees through your essence, weighs your true qualities . . . and appreciates you more fully than anyone else ever has.
Michael Cunningham