“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 Cunningham, quote from Specimen Days
“He wanted to tell her that he was inspired and vigilant and recklessly alone, that his body contained his unsteady heart and something else, something he felt but could not describe: porous and spiky, shifting with flecks of thought, with urge and memory; salted with brightness, flickerings of white and green and pale gold; something that loved stars because it was made of the same substance.”
― Michael Cunningham, quote from Specimen Days
“A sensation rose in him, a high tingling of his blood. There came a wave, a wind that recognized him, that did not love him or hate him. He felt what he knew as the rising of his self, the shifting innerness that yearned and feared, that was more familiar to him than anything could ever be. He knew that an answering substance gathered around him, emanating from the trees and the stars.
He stood staring at the constellations. Walt had sent him here, to find this, and he understood. He thought he understood. This was his heaven. It was not Broadway or the horse on wheels. It was grass and silence; it was a field of stars. It was what the book told him, night after night. When he died he would leave his defective body and turn into grass. He would be here like this, forever. There was no reason to fear it, because it was part of him. What he'd thought of as his emptiness, his absence of soul, was only a yearning for this.”
― Michael Cunningham, quote from Specimen Days
“Catherine thought Simon was in the locket, and in heaven, and with them still. Lucas hoped she didn't expect him to be happy about having so many Simons to contend with.”
― Michael Cunningham, quote from Specimen Days
“I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end. But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.”
― Michael Cunningham, quote from Specimen Days
“Gratitude is the only appropriate response to everything that happens.”
― Michael Cunningham, quote from Specimen Days
“In heaven, Lucas would be beautiful. He’d speak a language everyone understood.”
― Michael Cunningham, quote from Specimen Days
Michael Cunningham
Born place: in Cincinnati, Ohio, The United States
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“Evening prayer
I spend my life sitting, like an angel in a barber's chair,
Holding a beer mug with deep-cut designs,
My neck and gut both bent, while in the air
A weightless veil of pipe smoke hangs.
Like steaming dung within an old dovecote
A thousand Dreams within me softly burn:
From time to time my heart is like some oak
Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.
And then, when I have swallowed down my Dreams
In thirty, forty mugs of beer, I turn
To satisfy a need I can't ignore,
And like the Lord of Hyssop and of Myrrh
I piss into the skies, a soaring stream
That consecrates a patch of flowering fern.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from Complete Works
“Wieder hob sie den Blick und richtete die Lampe auf ihr Gesicht. Sie schaute zum Fenster hinüber. Ihre Züge waren jetzt fast noch deutlicher. Sie konnte die Details um ihre Nase studieren, den Mund. Die Haare. Sie sah nicht gut aus. Resigniert schaltete sie die Lampe aus und ließ sie sinken.
Und da sah sie es.
Ihr Spiegelbild verschwand nicht.
Es blieb im Fenster hängen, noch deutlicher als zuvor.
Eine Sekunge lang ließ sie sich davon einfach faszinieren.
Sie schnitt eine Grimasse.
Aber das Spiegelbild veränderte sich nicht.”
― Johan Harstad, quote from 172 Hours on the Moon
“Zabranjeni grad je pjesma u svojem najčistijem obliku. On je moj duhovni vrt gdje mogu leći među cvijeće i otpočinuti.”
― Anchee Min, quote from Empress Orchid
“Ignore and ignorance share the same root.”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird
“My head spins as I glance away, refusing to get sucked back into his gaze when so much is at risk.”
― Emily Giffin, quote from Love the One You're With
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Across the River and...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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