Great Expectations Quotes

“...I wanted to be more than a Rorschach, more legible than a symbol, more vivid and musical, at least to the kid, than even the most laureled statue could ever be. I wanted to be real in a way that history wasn't...”
― Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations

“It had always struck me as a place to be lost, experienced passage by passage in a series of unfolding images—not something you could take in in one possessive glance.”
― Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations

“For him, identity had been a kind of curation or collation—he picked up aspects as he went, freestyle.”
― Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations

“handsome”
― Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations

“He was a moving statue, made to stand in a great square and eke out noise. He mattered and didn’t, just as my own history did and didn’t. Just like the fathers I knew, who were there—they cast huge shadows and never sank—but were also ciphers, names that survived in our minds because of how deftly they evaded stable meaning. I wondered too—here my mind sharpened and wouldn’t let me skim—if I’d be this kind of silty half-entity for my own daughter. I knew that I wanted to be more than a Rorschach, more legible than a symbol, more vivid and musical, at least to the kid, than even the most laureled statue could ever be. I wanted to be real in a way that history wasn’t, and realized, listening to the new president, that I didn’t yet know how, couldn’t fathom where to begin. I pulled out my phone and opened the camera, stretched my arm unprayerfully toward the stage and took a picture. For”
― Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations

“The Kennedys, those beneficiaries and victims of fate, Catholics with Anglican looks and pagan luck, tended to come up all the time back then. Their myth, their thing, hovered in the air over the campaign. The Senator reminded people of JFK, for one: he was handsome and spoke well and had a pretty family. And then, it felt good to see Camelot in a guy who wasn’t white.”
― Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations

“The truth, he said, was that your life—and this was freedom—was a gesture minutely choreographed by God. To seek salvation required free will, but the one who had planted, and could count, the hairs on your head had also engineered your mechanisms of choice. Your heart could open only if He’d given it a hinge. He chose you before you chose Him, and so it was with every other eventuality, no matter how hidden or seemingly accidental. You are not lucky, my mother often said, you are blessed.”
― Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations

“We believed in predestination, he said, not in destiny; the latter word, despite what it shared in etymology with the former, contained no implication of an Author, and had therefore been co-opted by the squishy New Age.”
― Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations

“He was a moving statue, made to stand in a great square and eke out noise. He mattered and didn’t, just as my own history did and didn’t. Just like the fathers I knew, who were there—they cast huge shadows and never sank—but were also ciphers, names that survived in our minds because of how deftly they evaded stable meaning.”
― Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations

“am an organic Chicagoan,” Gwendolyn Brooks once said under interview. I probably felt that way once.”
― Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations

“We were vessels. Who knew what God would do.”
― Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations

“He says God's the stuff I already care about, the people I already love. Which, to me, makes sense.”
― Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations

“showed you how you could accept yourself instead of undergoing some monstrous transformation and still, somehow, make something, or be something, worthwhile.”
― Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations