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By Nightfall QUOTES

By Nightfall QUOTES

1 " The point of sex is...
Sex doesn't have a point. "

― Michael Cunningham , By Nightfall

2 " 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. "

― Michael Cunningham , By Nightfall

3 " Insomniacs know better than anyone how it would be to haunt a house. "

― Michael Cunningham , By Nightfall

4 " What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story? "

― Michael Cunningham , By Nightfall

5 " Please, God, send me something to adore. "

― Michael Cunningham , By Nightfall

6 " We always worry about the wrong things, don't we? "

― Michael Cunningham , By Nightfall

7 " Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it's Marilyn heading off to bed. "

― Michael Cunningham , By Nightfall

8 " 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 great writers have forgiven them for it. "

― Michael Cunningham , By Nightfall

9 " 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? "

― Michael Cunningham , By Nightfall

10 " 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? "

― Michael Cunningham , By Nightfall

11 " He's one of those smart, drifty young people who, after certain deliberations, decides he wants to do Something in the Arts but won't, possibly can't, think in terms of an actual job; who seems to imagine that youth and brains and willingness will simply summon an occupation, the precise and perfect nature of which will reveal itself in its own time. "

― Michael Cunningham , By Nightfall

12 " The problem with the truth is, it's so often mild and clichéd. "

― Michael Cunningham , By Nightfall

13 " He believes that a real work of art can be owned but should not be subject to capture; that it should radiate such authority, such bizarre but confident beauty (or unbeauty) that it can't be undone by even the most ludicrous sofas or side tables. A real work of art should rule the room, and the clients should call up not to complain about the art but to say that the art has helped them understand how the room is all a horrible mistake, can Peter suggest a designer to help them start over again. "

― Michael Cunningham , By Nightfall

14 " Peter glances out at the falling snow. Oh, little man. You have brought down your house not through passion but by neglect. You who dared to think of yourself as dangerous. You are guilty not of the epic transgressions but the tiny crimes. You have failed in the most base and human of ways - you have not imagined the lives of others. "

― Michael Cunningham , By Nightfall

15 " It's impossible to imagine, isn't it? Most men probably go through the same motions, more or less, but what's in their minds, what agitates their blood? What could be more mortifyingly personal, what veers closer to the depths, than whatever it is that makes us come? If we knew, if we could see what's in the cartoon balloons over other guy's heads as they jerk off, would we be moved, or repelled? "

― Michael Cunningham , By Nightfall

16 " He feels, as he sometimes does, as most people must, a presence in the room, what he can only think of as his and Rebecca's living ghosts, the amalgamation of their dreams and their breathing, their smells. He does not believe in ghosts, but he believes in...something. Something viable, something living, that's surprised when he wakes at this hour, that's neither glad nor sorry to see him awake but that recognizes the fact, because it has been interrupted in its nocturnal inchoate musings. "

― Michael Cunningham , By Nightfall

17 " There's no denying his resemblance to the Rodin bronze - the slender, effortless muscularity of youth, the extravagant nonchalance of it; that sense that beauty is in fact the natural human condition and not the rarest of mutations. "

― Michael Cunningham , By Nightfall

18 " This is a Southern gift, isn't it - tremendous self-regard diluted with humor and modesty. That's what they mean by Southern charm, right? "

― Michael Cunningham , By Nightfall

19 " The art we produce lives in queasy balance with the art we can imagine the art the room expects. "

― Michael Cunningham , By Nightfall

20 " Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity. "

― Michael Cunningham , By Nightfall