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Specimen Days QUOTES

Specimen Days QUOTES

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

― Michael Cunningham , Specimen Days

2 " 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 , Specimen Days

3 " 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 , Specimen Days

4 " 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 , Specimen Days

5 " 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 , Specimen Days

6 " Gratitude is the only appropriate response to everything that happens. "

― Michael Cunningham , Specimen Days

7 " In heaven, Lucas would be beautiful. He’d speak a language everyone understood. "

― Michael Cunningham , Specimen Days

8 " 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 realms of glory? What about walking around in golden slippers?"
"We abandon consciousness as if we were waking from a bad dream. We throw it off like clothes that never fit us right. It's an ecstatic release we're physically unable to apprehend while we're in our bodies. Orgasm is our best hint, but it's crude and minor by comparison. "

― Michael Cunningham , Specimen Days

9 " 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 , Specimen Days