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5876a54
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Please, God, send me something to adore.
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Michael Cunningham |
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867ba15
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I am beginning to understand the true difference between youth and age. Young people have time to make plans and think of new ideas. Older people need their whole energy to keep up with what's already been set in motion.
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Michael Cunningham |
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5f785a8
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We always worry about the wrong things, don't we?
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Michael Cunningham |
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457d8d6
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Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it's Marilyn heading off to bed.
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Michael Cunningham |
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9151e7d
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Here is what unsayable about us: Jonathan and I are members of a team so old nobody else could join even if we wanted them to. What binds us is stronger than sex. It is stronger than love. We're related. Each of us is the other born into a different flesh.
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Michael Cunningham |
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c3ac328
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She is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other word for it.
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Michael Cunningham |
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c3ee515
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Like the morning you walked out of that old house, when you were eighteen and I was, well, I had just turned nineteen, hadn't I? I was a nineteen-year-old and I was in love with Louis and I was in love with you, and I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful as the sight of you walking out a glass door in the early morning, still sleepy, in your underwear. Isn't it strange?
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Michael Cunningham |
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e4eca4b
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he felt himself entering a moment so real he could only run toward it, shouting.
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Michael Cunningham |
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91fa229
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She'd never imagined it like this-when she thought of someone (a woman like herself)losing her mind, she'd imagined shrieks and wails, hallucinations; but at that moment it had seemed clear that there was another way, far quieter; a way that was numb and hopeless, flat, so much so that an emotion as strong as sorrow would have been a relief.
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Michael Cunningham |
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7249469
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People are more than you think they are. And they're less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.
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Michael Cunningham |
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75f94f4
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a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm
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Michael Cunningham |
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4c3e85d
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We'd hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves.
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Michael Cunningham |
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e289d89
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It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers; and even the sex, once she and Richard reached that point, was ardent but awkward, unsatisfying, ore kindly than pa..
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Michael Cunningham |
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4b0da35
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She wants to have baked a cake that banishes sorrow, even if only for a little while.
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Michael Cunningham |
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de435c6
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Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.
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life
reflection
world
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Michael Cunningham |
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5f8853d
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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 of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some di..
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Michael Cunningham |
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356b2a3
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Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together.
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Michael Cunningham |
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8728052
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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.
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Michael Cunningham |
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9cfcf2c
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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.
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Michael Cunningham |
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7f65084
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Most of us are safe. If you're not a delirious dream the gods are having, if your beauty doesn't trouble the constellations, nobody's going to cast a spell on you.
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Michael Cunningham |
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040152d
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You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.
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Michael Cunningham |
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7f31f20
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You have failed in the most base and human of ways--you have not imagined the lives of others.
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Michael Cunningham |
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c0d29e4
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He says, '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 then 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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8596b05
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Yes," she answers and does not move. She might, at this moment, be nothing but a floating intelligence; not even a brain inside a skull, just a presence that perceives, as a ghoast might. Yes, she thinks, this is probably how it must feel to be a ghost. It's a little like reading, isn't it-that same sensation of knowing people, settings, situations, without playing any particular part beyond that of the willing observer."
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Michael Cunningham |
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d8b3963
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Right now she is reading Virginia Woolf, all of Virginia Woolf, book by book-She is fascinated by the idea of a woman like that, a woman of such brilliance, such strangeness, such immeasurable sorrow; a woman who had genius but still filled her pocket with a stone and waded out into a river.
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Michael Cunningham |
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a2413ba
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She, Laura, likes to imagine (it's one of her most closely held secrets) that she has a touch of brilliance herself, just a hint of it, though she knows most people probably walk around with similar hopeful suspicions curled up like tiny fists inside them, never divulged. She wonders, while she pushes a cart through the supermarket or has her hair done, it the other women aren't all thinking, to some degree or other, the same thing: Here is..
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Michael Cunningham |
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c1b9af0
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I wanted a settled life and a shocking one. Think of Van Gogh, cypress trees and church spires under a sky of writhing snakes. I was my father's daughter. I wanted to be loved by someone like my tough judicious mother and I wanted to run screaming through the headlights with a bottle in my hand. That was the family curse. We tended to nurse flocks of undisciplined wishes that collided and canceled each other out. The curse implied that if w..
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desires
glbtq
indecision
romance
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Michael Cunningham |
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7afd089
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Maybe it's not, in the end, the virtues of others that so wrenches our hearts as it is the sense of almost unbearably poignant recognition when we see them at their most base, in their sorrow and gluttony and foolishness. You need the virtues, too--some sort of virtues--but we don't care about Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina or Raskolnikov because they're good. We care about them because they're not admirable, because they're us, and because g..
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Michael Cunningham |
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a5b15c6
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One often feels exalted, expanded, in his presence. He is not one of those egotists who miniaturize others. He is the opposite kind of egotist, driven by grandiosity rather than greed, and if he insists on a version of you that is funnier, stranger, more eccentric and profound than 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..
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Michael Cunningham |
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5845352
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sanity involves a certain measure of impersonation, not simply for the benefit of husband and servants but for the sake, first and foremost, of one's own convictions.
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Michael Cunningham |
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ee817be
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It's hardly ever the destination we've been anticipating, is it? Our hopes may seem unrealized, but we were in all likelihood hoping for the wrong thing. Where did we - the species, that is - pick up that strange and perverse habit?
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Michael Cunningham |
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f0e1c63
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I 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 o..
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death
glbtq
life
love
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Michael Cunningham |
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f142aa9
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Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port.
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Michael Cunningham |
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5cd3bef
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She's had a long life. Now she's going to the Lord." "Frankly it creeps me out a little when you say things like that," Simon said. "It shouldn't. If you don't like 'Lord,' pick another word. She's going home. She's going back to the party. Whatever you like." "I suppose you have some definite ideas about an afterlife." "Sure. We get reabsorbed into the earthly and celestial mechanism." "No heaven?" "That's heaven." "What about realm..
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death
orgasm
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Michael Cunningham |
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ca0a96d
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You live with the threat of my extinction. I live with it too.
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Michael Cunningham |
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13cfd6b
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I'm not this unusual," she said. "It's just my hair." She looked at Bobby and she looked at me, with an expression at once disdainful and imploring. She was forty, pregnant, and in love with two men at once. I think what she could not abide was the zaniness of her life. Like many of us, she had grown up expecting romance to bestow dignity and direction. "Be brave," I told her. Bobby and I stood before her, confused and homeless and lacking ..
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glbtq
love
pregnancy
pregnant-woman
romance
self-doubt
threesome
triangle
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Michael Cunningham |
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5a39710
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What marriage doesn't involve uncountable accretions, a language of gestures, a sense of recognition sharp as a toothache? Unhappy, sure. What couple isn't unhappy, at least part of the time? But how can the divorce rate be, as they say, skyrocketing? How miserable would you have to get to be able to bear the actual separation, to go off and live your life so utterly unrecognized?
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Michael Cunningham |
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eb2151c
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Accept that, like many men, you have a streak of the homoerotic in you. Why would you, why would anyone, want to be that straight?
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Michael Cunningham |
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4891e71
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What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half.
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joy
love
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Michael Cunningham |
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ce78107
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You know, if you're hopeful, if you're even a little bit happy about something that might happen, it doesn't affect the outcome. You could still give yourself a period of optimism, even if it all falls apart.
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optimism
outcomes
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Michael Cunningham |
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1976128
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She knew she was going to have trouble believing in herself, in the room of her house, and when she glanced over at this new book on her nightstand, stacked atop the one she finished last night, she reached for it automatically, as if reading were the singular and obvious first task of the day, the only viable way to negotiate the transit from sleep to obligation.
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Michael Cunningham |
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744e5d5
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How are you feeling, man?" he asks me. "Great," I tell him, and it is purely the truth. Doves clatter up out of a bare tree and turn at the same instant, transforming themselves from steel to silver in the snow-blown light. I know at that moment that the drug is working. Everything before me has become suddenly, radiantly itself. How could Carlton have known this was about to happen? "Oh," I whisper. His hand settles on my shoulder. "Stay l..
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assurance
brothers
confidence
drug-trip
drugs
reality
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Michael Cunningham |
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b513482
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I suppose at heart it was the haircut that did it; that exploded the ordinary order of things and showed me the possibilities that had been there all along, hidden among the patterns in the wallpaper. In a different age, we used to take acid for more or less the same reason.
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change
drugs
glbtq
haircut
identity
life
possibilities
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Michael Cunningham |
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41eb149
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You know what I am?" he says. "What?" "I'm an ordinary person." "Come on." "I know. Who isn't an ordinary person? How horribly presumptuous to want to be anything else. But I have to tell you. I've been treated as something special for so long and I've tried my hardest to be something special but I'm not, I'm not exceptional, I'm smart enough, but I'm not brilliant and I'm not spiritual or even all that focused. I think I can stand that, bu..
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Michael Cunningham |