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Quote by Michael Cunningham

“I've felt it for some time now, closing around me like the jaws of a gigantic flower. Isn't that a peculiar analogy? It feels that way, though. It has a certain vegetable inevitability. Think of the Venus flytrap. Think of kudzu choking a forest. It's a sort of juicy, green, thriving process. Toward, well, you know. The green silence. Isn't it funny that, even now, it's difficult to say the word 'death'?”

Book:The Hours

Work

The Hours

The Hours is a complex narrative that weaves together the lives of three women: a modern-day housewife, a 1940s Los Angeles housewife, and a 1920s English writer. The story delves into the psychological and emotional journeys of these characters, highlighting their connections to the literary masterpiece 'Mrs. Dalloway' by Virginia Woolf. The novel is renowned for its exploration of themes such as the passage of time, the nature of memory, and the role of art in one's life. more

Author

Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham is an American writer renowned for his novel 'The Hours', which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. His works often explore themes of identity, memory, and gender. more

“Your dying was a difficult enterprise. First, petty things took up your energies, The small but clustering duties of the sick, Irritant as the cough’s dry rhetoric. Those hours of waiting for pills, shot, X-ray Or test (while you read novels two a day) Already with a kind of clumsy stealth Distanced you from the habits of your health.”

Death Poetry Loss Grief Dying Poem Illness Mourning Medical Care

Author:Thom Gunn

“If we begin to die when we live, and long life be but a prolongation of death, our life is a sad composition; we live with death, and die not in a moment.”

Life Death Time Dying Sad Living

Book:Urne Burial

Source: Urne Burial

“Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth.”

Philosophy

Book:Essays and aphorisms

Source: Essays and aphorisms

“Thousands upon thousands of millions of minute and diverse individuals had come together and the product of their mutual dependence, their mutual hostility had been a human life. Their total colony, their living hive had been a man. The hive was dead. But in the lingering warmth many of the component individuals still faintly lived; soon they also would have perished. And meanwhile, from the air, the invisible hosts of saprophytics had already begun their unresisted invasion. They would live among the dead cells, they would grow, and prodigiously multiply and in their growing and procreation all the chemical building of the body would be undone, all the intricacies and complications of its matter would be resolved, till by the time their work was finished a few pounds of carbon, a few quarts of water, some lime, a little phosphorus and sulphur, a pinch of iron and silicon, a handful of mixed salts--all scattered and recombined with the surrounding world--would be all that remained of Everard Webley's ambition to rule and his love for Elinor, of his thoughts about politics and his recollections of childhood, of his fencing and good horsemanship, of that soft strong voice and that suddenly illuminating smile, of his admiration for Mantegna, his dislike of whiskey, his deliberately terrifying rages, his habit of stroking his chin, his belief in God, his incapacity to whistle a tune correctly, his unshakeable determinations and his knowledge of Russian.”