Quote collection
647 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days--listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you've taken in, all that you've overheard, and you turn it into gold. (Or at least you try.)"
"For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms."
"Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food."
"You know how I always say that laughter is carbonated holiness? Well, Robin was the ultimate proof of that, and bubbles are spirit made visible."
"When we search for something larger than our own selves to hook into, we can come through whatever life throws at us."
"Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend."
"Her purse was a weight, ballast; it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away."
"I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist."
"I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is."
"Left to my own devices, my first inclination is to mess in other people's lives. I secretly believe my whole family, and really the whole world, is my responsibility."
"There are moments when I am writing when I think that if other people knew how I felt right now, they’d burn me at the stake for feeling so good, so full, so much intense pleasure."
"...music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, the breath. We're walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn't get to any other way."
"She felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of life's little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together."
"So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed."
"The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty."
"Perfection is shallow, unreal, and fatally uninteresting."
"Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises."
"You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started."
"I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down."
"one thing about having a baby is that each step of the way you simply cannot imagine loving him any more than you already do, because you are bursting with love, loving as much as you are humanly capable of- and then you do, you love him even more."