Michael Cunningham Quotes

We all feel wistfulness or regret about roads not taken.

The scene I had just witnessed (a couple making love in the ocean) brought back a lot of memories – not of things I had done but of things I had failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back. I envied Yeoman and felt sorry for myself at the same time, because I had seen him in a moment that made all my happiness seem dull.

And all the trips you know you missed And all the lips you never kissed Cut through you like a knife. And now you see stretched out before thee Just another story of a life.

Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.

Just like that. Gone forever. They will not grow old together. They will never live on a beach by the sea, their hair turned white, dancing in a living room to Billie Holiday or Nat Cole. They will not enter a New York club at midnight and show the poor hip-hop fools how to dance. They will not chuckle together over the endless folly of the world, its vanities and stupid ambitions. They will not hug each other in any chilly New York dawn. Oh, Mary Lou. My baby. My love.

It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on - don't take it from me now

... we chase after ghosts and spirits and are left holding only memories and dreams. It's not that we want what we can't have; it's that we've held all we could want and then had to watch it slip away.

There are many things that I feel I have missed out on.

It's funny how you never think about the women you've had. It's always the ones who get away that you can't forget.

Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming.

It's defeatist to harp on what might have been, and yet, it's hard to resist considering what might have been.

For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, 'It might have been'.

Life's missed opportunities, at the end, may seem more poignant to us than those we embraced - because in our imagination they have a perfection that reality can never rival.

Oh longing for places that were not Cherished enough in that fleeting hour How I long to make good from afar The forgotten gesture, the additional act.

There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were.

He missed his imagined future.

Past happiness augments present wretchedness.

I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

I wanna get back To the old days When the phone would ring And I knew it was you I wanna talk back And get yelled at Fight for nothing Like we used to Oh kiss me Like you mean it Like you miss me Cuz I know you do I wanna get back, get back I wanna get back, get back I wanna get back, get back Get Back

Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled; on the contrary; in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me; I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.

You can tell it any way you want but that's the way it is. I should of done it and I didnt. And some part of me has never quit wishin I could go back. And I cant. I didn't know you could steal your own life. And I didnt know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal. I thinkI done the best with itI knew how but itstill wasntmine. It neverhas been.

I don't know what else to tell you. I often think how different my life would have been - how much happier - if you'd been a part of it. One day.

There is a general place in your brain, I think, reserved for melancholy of relationships past. It grows and prospers as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your better judgment, to listen to country music.

In this moment she felt that she had been robbed of an enormous number of valuable things, whether material or intangible: things lost or broken by her own fault, things she had forgotten and left in houses when she moved: books borrowed from her and not returned, journeys she had planned and had not made, words she had waited to hear spoken to her and had not heard, and the words she meant to answer with. . . .

I spent my whole childhood wishing I were older and now I'm spending my adulthood wishing I were younger.