“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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“I worry there is something broken in our generation,
there are too many sad eyes on happy faces.”
― Atticus Poetry, quote from Love Her Wild
“...Teachings are given to different men under different circumstances and in different times... [but] ...the Lord is the same yesterday, today and forever. If a parent commands a little child not to play with matches, and then commands a teenager to light the campfire, is this a contradiction? It's only a question of preparedness - one is ready and one is not.”
― Chris Heimerdinger, quote from Gadiantons and the Silver Sword
“Equally important was the fact that the interpretation provided the model for how Tianming had hidden his message in the three stories. He employed two basic methods: dual-layer metaphors and two-dimensional metaphors. The dual-layer metaphors in the stories did not directly point to the real meaning, but to something far simpler. The tenor of this first metaphor became the vehicle for a second metaphor, which pointed to the real intelligence. In the current example, the princess’s boat, the He’ershingenmosiken soap, and the Glutton’s Sea formed a metaphor for a paper boat driven by soap. The paper boat, in turn, pointed to curvature propulsion. Previous attempts at decipherment had failed largely due to people’s habitual belief that the stories only involved a single layer of metaphors to hide the real message. The two-dimensional metaphors were a technique used to resolve the ambiguities introduced by literary devices employed in conveying strategic intelligence. After a dual-layer metaphor, a single-layer supporting metaphor was added to confirm the meaning of the dual-layer metaphor. In the current example, the curved snow-wave paper and the ironing required to flatten it served as a metaphor for curved space, confirming the interpretation of the soap-driven boat. If one viewed the stories as a two-dimensional plane, the dual-layer metaphor only provided one coordinate; the supporting single-layer metaphor provided a second coordinate that fixed the interpretation on the plane. Thus, this single-layer metaphor was also called the bearing coordinate. Viewed by itself, the bearing coordinate seemed meaningless, but once combined with the dual-layer metaphor, it resolved the inherent ambiguities in literary language. “A subtle and sophisticated system,” a PIA specialist said admiringly. All the committee members congratulated Cheng Xin and AA. AA, who had always been looked down on, saw her status greatly elevated among the committee members. Cheng”
― Liu Cixin, quote from Death's End
“Heaven has no room for the self-righteous.”
― C. Robert Cargill, quote from Dreams and Shadows
“Maybe the clever people are not the ones who think they’re clever. Maybe the clever people are the ones who accept that they know nothing.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from Perfect
Beg for Mercy
The Light Bearer
The Illegal Gardener
Among Thieves
Don't Let Me Go
I am an Emotional Cr...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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