I was not beautiful, but I believed I had the possibility of beauty in me.

— Michael Cunningham

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

— Michael Cunningham

Julian is bluff and sturdy, royal; he possesses a gracefully muscular, equine beauty so natural it suggests that beauty itself is a fundamental human condition and not a mutation in the general design.

— Michael Cunningham

Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?

— Michael Cunningham

Man," he said, "I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want."" What do we want?" I asked blurring." Aw, man, you know," he said. "We just want, well, the same things these people wanted."" What was that?" He shrugged. "To live, I guess," he said.

— Michael Cunningham

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

One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

— Michael Cunningham

One of the reasons ordinary people are incapable of magic is simple dearth of conviction.

— Michael Cunningham

She could, she thinks, have entered a different life. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

— Michael Cunningham

She'd never been religious. She hadn't allowed grief to send her crawling to the church.

— Michael Cunningham