Day Quotes

“Do you think we ever really survive our childhoods?”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“You’re beautiful in your own skin. You brought with you into the world some kind of human amazingness, and you can depend on it, always. Please try not to ever let anybody talk you out of that.”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“She wanted this. She wanted the marriage. She wanted the kids. She wanted the place in Brooklyn, refused to worry overmuch about the mortgage payments. She wanted the job, too. She was good at it. She strove. She outperformed others. The trick now, it seems, is to keep wanting it, the job as well as the marriage, motherhood, the stratospherically costly handbag. The trick is learning not to despise herself for her claustrophobia and disappointment”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“two people who can’t stop paying attention, ever; who are compelled to worry about the future because the future threatens to unmake their children. Two people who thought, each in her own way, that she’d be different. The secret is neither more nor less than this, the two of them, here.”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“Again, always, the fundamental question: are you protecting your children or are you sowing the seeds of what will prove to be a lifetime of mistrust?”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“They hesitate. It seems that they share a secret but the secret can’t be spoken. The secret is this, the two of them, silent together, weary and vigilant, unaccompanied in the world although they are not alone in it; waiting, both of them, for something to collapse: the chair, the house, the economy; alert to the possibility of distant sounds: an approaching car, a whimpering child; two people who can’t stop paying attention, ever; who are compelled to worry about the future because the future threatens to unmake their children. Two people who thought, each in her own way, that she’d be different. The secret is neither more nor less than this, the two of them, here.”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“Dan extinguishes the ignition and turns off the headlights. The house looks more charming, less shabby, and desolate in this purplish semi-dark. The house could be a life-size version of a model railroad house in which human beings can miraculously live among trees made of styrofoam behind opaque windows that are simply rectangles of yellow-tinted light glowing on a train table in somebody's basement.”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“It would be easier if she felt surer about hte lines that separate pity from desire, and desire from rage”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“Dan delivers a kiss in her general direction and heads back to the bedroom. Isabell watches his retreating form, struggling to muster more affection for him, which, she's found, can be easier when he's leaving a room, not so much because he's removing himself but because it's more possible, then, to fully apprehend the fact that in leaving her he's entering another room where he
ll be alone again with his music and his invisible followers, the isolated inhabitedness of his days.”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“on the exhausted old rose-pink armchair with tufts of stuffing protruding along its seams, as if the chair itself were about to abandon the effort required to remain a chair at all.”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“It might be the wrong place. Or it might be the right place, and her expectations were wrong. It’s impossible to tell.”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“Maybe she’s just growing up. Maybe it happens to have coincided with getting sick. She is, whatever the reason, turning into someone who’s still effusively polite to others, who still says hello there and how are you and goodbye for now with more brio than the occasion calls for but does so from an inner remoteness no one but her father (and Isabel?) could notice. She’s possessed of an innerness. She’s acquired a tucked-away quality, as if she’s become a Violet who performs as ever but cares less about how her performances are received. A Violet who still wants others to admire her but will survive unharmed if they don’t. A Violet who apprehends, for the first time, her own future, in which no one in her present, including her father and mother, will turn out to have mattered all that much.”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“Some things aren’t worth the trouble. Even if we got them for almost nothing at a flea market.”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“Most people, even (or especially) those who care most about you, will permit you a month or two of mourning before they start growing impatient, on your behalf, and on theirs.”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“Here, then, is the answer. A degree of cruelty is necessary because Garth, like most men, can only deposit his needs at her feet, can only declare his love—that romantic hallucination, which would begin to fade as soon as she said yes—can only say, Here is my desire, here is my loneliness, what are you going to do about it?”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“We love each other because we can’t truly love ourselves, we depend on each other because we can’t depend on ourselves.”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“She says, “You’re not in love with me.”
“Trust me. I’ve had a lot of experience at not being in love with people. I’ve been not in love with pretty much everybody, all my life.”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“Does it ever get to be too late? If neither of you abuses the dog (should they finally get a dog?) or leaves the children in the car on a hot day. Does it ever become irreparable? If so, when? How do you, how does any“one, know when they cross over from working through this to it’s too late? Is there (she suspects there must be) an interlude during which you’re so bored or disappointed or ambushed by regret that it is, truly, too late? Or, more to the point, do we arrive at it’s too late over and over again, only to return to working through this before it’s too late arrives, yet again?”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“Beyond lust there’s a purity, you know?”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“A woman paralyzed by her own selfishness and triviality, a woman who knew she should love her life more than she did but couldn’t seem to love her life beyond a few odd inconsequential incidents.”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“Isabel is embarrassed about her sadness. She’s embarrassed about being embarrassed about her sadness, she who has love and money. She tries looking discreetly into her bag for a Kleenex, without anything that could be called frantic rummaging. She ponders the prospect that decadent unhappiness might, in its way, be worse than genuine, legitimate despair. Which is, as she knows, a decadent question to pose at all.”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“A woman paralyzed by her own selfishness and triviality, a woman who knew she should love her life more than she did but couldn’t seem to love her life beyond a few odd inconsequential incidents.

It is, in fact, time to start dating again. But Dan has no idea what that means for a gay man well into his thirties who has neither money nor abs.

- if you’re delivering a song, there are instances when the veil of the ordinary falls away and you are, fleetingly, a supernatural being, with music rampaging through you and soaring out into a crowd. You connect, you’re giving it, you’re the living sweat-slicked manifestation of music itself, the crowd feels it as piercingly as you do. Always, almost always, you “spot a girl. She doesn’t need to be pretty. She’s the love of somebody’s life (you hope she is), and for those few seconds she’s the love of yours, you’re singing to her and she’s singing back to you, by raising her arms over her head and swinging her hips, adoring you or, rather, adoring some being who is you and the song combined, able to touch her everywhere. It’s the briefest of love affairs. -

Isabel is embarrassed about her sadness. She’s embarrassed about being embarrassed about her sadness, she who has love and money. She tries looking discreetly into her bag for a Kleenex, without anything that could be called frantic rummaging. She ponders the prospect that decadent unhappiness might, in its way, be worse than genuine, legitimate despair. Which is, as she knows, a decadent question to pose at all.

- members of a biological aristocracy -

Dan is taken by a tremor of scorn twisted up with painful affection, as if they were two names for the same emotion

- but that’s my narcissism speaking ive been working on the idea that there are other people in the world -

Beyond lust there’s a purity, you know?

Does it ever get to be too late? If neither of you abuses the dog (should they finally get a dog?) or leaves the children in the car on a hot day. Does it ever become irreparable? If so, when? How do you, how does any“one, know when they cross over from working through this to it’s too late? Is there (she suspects there must be) an interlude during which you’re so bored or disappointed or ambushed by regret that it is, truly, too late? Or, more to the point, do we arrive at it’s too late over and over again, only to return to working through this before it’s too late arrives, yet again?

Do you think we ever really survive our childhoods?

Most mothers think their children are amazing and singular people. Most mothers are wrong about that.

You’re beautiful in your own skin. You brought with you into the world some kind of human amazingness, and you can depend on it, always. Please try not to ever let anybody talk you out of that.

She says, “You’re not in love with me.”
“Trust me. I’ve had a lot of experience at not being in love with people. I’ve been not in love with pretty much everybody, all my life.”

She wonders how many women think more kindly and, all right, more lustfully toward their husbands after they’ve left them. Maybe someone’s done a study.

“If you’re determined to be insulted.”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“Those years were Robbie’s first experience of himself as a memory—a figure who’d entered and exited, somebody’s gay phase, remembered fondly, but (this seemed impossible, given all that they’d said and done) unmourned, relegated, a story from Zach’s colorful past.”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“This early, the East River takes on a thin layer of translucence, a bright steely skin that appears to float over the ricer itself as the water turns from its nocturnal black to the opaque deep green of the approaching day.

It’s almost time now.”
― Michael Cunningham, Day