By Nightfall Quotes

“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

“Insomniacs know better than anyone how it would be to haunt a house.”
― Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

“Please, God, send me something to adore.”
― Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

“What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story?”
― Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

“We always worry about the wrong things, don't we?”
― Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

“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

“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

“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

“The point of sex is...
Sex doesn't have a point.”
― Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

“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

“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

“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

“The art we produce lives in queasy balance with the art we can imagine the art the room expects.”
― Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

“Any other vexations to report?" he asks.

"I love the word 'vexations.'"

"It's the 'x.' Nice to jump off a 'v' and bite into an 'x' like that."

"Just the usual ones," she says.

"How was the weekend?"

"Vexing. Not really, I just wanted to say it. You?”
― Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

“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

“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, but I'm not sure if the people around me can.”
― Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

“Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.”
― Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

“What did Shakespeare say? Or little lives are rounded with a sleep.”
― Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

“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

“The problem with the truth is, it's so often mild and clichéd.”
― Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

“Do we ever give anyone the gift they actually want?”
― Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

“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

“Peter hesitates. "Ridiculous" is the least of it. How about offensive, insulting? How about the implication that "someone who's never used" is a sad and small figure, standing on the platform, sensibly dressed, as the bus pulls in? Even now, after all those ad campaigns, after all we've learned about how bad it really and truly gets, there is the glamour of self-destruction, imperishable, gem-hard, like some cursed ancient talisman that cannot be destroyed by any known means. Still, still, the ones who go down can seem as if they're more complicatedly, more dangerously attuned to the sadness and, yes, the impossible grandeur. They're romantic, goddamn them; we just can't get it up in quite the same way for the sober and sensible, the dogged achievers, for all the good they do. We don't adore them with the exquisite disdain we can bring to the addicts and miscreants. It helps, of course - let's not get carried away - if you're a young prince like Mizzy, and you've actually got something of value to destroy in the first place.”
― Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

“Oh, all you immigrants and visionaries, what do you hope to find here, who do you hope to become?”
― Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

“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

“Gus the driver is everywhere and yet he appears nowhere, not in portraits or photographs, not even in the stories of men like Barthelme and Carver, who were all about guys with jobs and prospects like Gus's but who insisted on more sorrow, more angst, than Gus remotely manifests. If Gus weeps sometimes for no reason, if he stands despairing in the aisle of a Wal-Mart, it is not apparent in his daily demeanor...”
― Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

“The world is full of Guses--good-looking boys and girls who've been dealt the best possible genetic hand by parents and grandparents and great-grandparents who have been doing neither well nor badly for generations; who engender these decent kids and give them just enough to survive in the world but no more--no spectacular beauty, no uncontainable brilliance, no kingly, unstoppable ambition.

Isn't it the task of art to acclaim these people, to ennoble them? Consider Olympia. A girl of the streets becomes a deity.”
― Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

“Parents are the mystified criminals, blinking in the docks, making it all the worse for themselves with every word they utter.”
― Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

“And yet, it gives Peter nothing. Not now. Not today. Not when he needs... more. More than this well-executed idea. More than the shark in the tank meant to frighten, more than the guy on the street meant to say something pithy about celebrity. More than this.”
― Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

“I have to keep reminding myself that almost everybody is always lying.”
― Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall