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ea2fec6
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You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
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peace
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Michael Cunningham |
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2ebdfb6
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I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.
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Michael Cunningham |
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ec8cad3
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The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.
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flying
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Michael Cunningham |
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6e715b1
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We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're v..
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suicide
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Michael Cunningham |
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1bf7d7a
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Dear Leonard. To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard. Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.
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Michael Cunningham |
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c9ec45e
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Beauty is a whore, I like money better.
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money
beauty
life
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Michael Cunningham |
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b57a9c8
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I remember one morning getting up at dawn. There was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling. And I... I remember thinking to myself: So this is the beginning of happiness, this is where it starts. And of course there will always be more...never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment, right then.
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Michael Cunningham |
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6d19b2b
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How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him; if she'd returned Richard's kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him, never bought the packet of incense or the alpaca coat with rose-shaped buttons. Couldn't they have discovered something larger and stranger than what they've got. It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, ..
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memory
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Michael Cunningham |
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6a2b3cd
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There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.
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Michael Cunningham |
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e124ac3
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There is 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 , though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so.
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Michael Cunningham |
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adeff9e
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These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody's little display of genius.
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Michael Cunningham |
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d1d23be
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What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. And there it is... It was death. I chose life.
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Michael Cunningham |
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1fa700b
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Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.
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death
life
inspirational
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Michael Cunningham |
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1f0d0ca
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I don't have any regrets, really, except that one. I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.
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Michael Cunningham |
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8dac703
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we become the stories we tell ourselves
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Michael Cunningham |
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c627b4c
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You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.
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Michael Cunningham |
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0f84957
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She is, above all else, tired; she wants more than anything to return to her bed and her book. The world, this world, feels suddenly stunned and stunted, far from everything.
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Michael Cunningham |
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35a2bf0
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Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.
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Michael Cunningham |
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afaf240
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I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
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romance
life
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Michael Cunningham |
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c02572e
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But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another.
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Michael Cunningham |
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58f85d1
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Perhaps, in the extravagance of youth, we give away our devotions easily and all but arbitrarily, on the mistaken assumption that we'll always have more to give.
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Michael Cunningham |
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67d7fcd
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She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.
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Michael Cunningham |
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d569065
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What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.
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Michael Cunningham |
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c4943fa
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We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep - it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. 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 ..
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Michael Cunningham |
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f1a8181
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He 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.
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Michael Cunningham |
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ea86d84
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This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.
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life
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Michael Cunningham |
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7806e14
|
There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.
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perfection
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Michael Cunningham |
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f102e5a
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That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other.
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Michael Cunningham |
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0c43aea
|
We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds & expectations, to burst open & give us everything we've ever imagined, thou..
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suicide
life
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Michael Cunningham |
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7b3a1ae
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What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted something alive and shocking enough that it could be a morning in somebody's life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that.
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Michael Cunningham |
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e1e5347
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She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric.
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Michael Cunningham |
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08669aa
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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.
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Michael Cunningham |
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fa736e7
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There are times when you don't belong and you think you're going to kill yourself. Once I went to a hotel. Later that night I made a plan. The plan was I would leave my family when my second child was born. And that's what I did. I got up one morning, made breakfast, went to the bus stop, got on a bus. I'd left a note. I got a job in a library in Canada. It would be wonderful to say you regretted it. It would be easy. But what does it mean?..
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hopelessness
loneliness
spirit
life
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Michael Cunningham |
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ee25b70
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She 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.
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Michael Cunningham |
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9fe8dfe
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Clarissa will be bereaved, deeply lonely, but she will not die. She will be too much in love with life, with London. Virginia imagines someone else, yes, someone strong of body but frail-minded; someone with a touch of genius, of poetry, ground under by the wheels of the world, by war and government, by doctors; a someone who is, technically speaking insane, because that person sees meaning everywhere, knows that trees are sentient beings a..
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Michael Cunningham |
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62d1eac
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I don't know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that." "You don't have to go to the party. You don't have to go to the ceremony. You don't have to do anything at all." "But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick."
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Michael Cunningham |
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f6dcbc5
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Insomniacs know better than anyone how it would be to haunt a house.
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Michael Cunningham |
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1e9d0e9
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A stray fact: insects are not drawn to candle flames, they are drawn to the light on the far side of the flame, they go into the flame and sizzle to nothingness because they're so eager to get to the light on the other side.
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insects
fact
flame
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Michael Cunningham |
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bdc942c
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Oh, pride, pride. I was so wrong. It defeated me. It simply proved insurmountable. There was so much, oh, far too much for me. I mean, there's the weather, there's the water and the land, there are the animals, and the buildings, and the past and the future, there's space, there's history. There's this thread or something caught between my teeth, there's the old woman across the way, did you notice she switched the donkey and the squirrel o..
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Michael Cunningham |
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29bf3ba
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What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story?
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Michael Cunningham |
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820c57c
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and when somebody comes up to me with big hair and gobs of makeup on and says, 'Can I help you,' it's all I can do not to scream, 'Bitch, you can't even help yourself.
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Michael Cunningham |
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f4a5236
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I'm talking about a little truth-in-packaging here. To be perfectly frank, you don't quite like yourself. And if you walk around looking like someone other than who you are, you could end up getting the wrong job, the wrong friends, who knows what-all. You could end up with somebody else's life." I shrugged again, and smiled. "This is my life," I said. "It doesn't seem like the wrong one."
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identity
life
hair
self
haircut
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Michael Cunningham |
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2429d5a
|
She thinks how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in gestures and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.
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Michael Cunningham |
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9638352
|
Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself.
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Michael Cunningham |