Quote collection
198 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I set my toothbrush down, then leaned into the mirror and stared into my own eyes. I could feel myself disintegrating inside myself like a past-bloom flower in the wind. Every time I moved a muscle, another petal of me blew away. Please, I thought. Please."
"No' is golden. 'No' is the kind of power the good witch wields. It's the way whole, healthy, emotionally evolved people manage to have relationships with jackasses while limiting the amount of jackass in their lives."
"The most important thing for aspiring writers is for them to give themselves permission to be brave on the page, to write in the presence of fear, to go to those places that you think you can’t write - really that’s exactly what you need to write."
"I'd finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in."
"So much of what I've learned, so much of what's good in my life, was learned because something bad happened, or from making the wrong decision. Through bad decisions I learned how to find the ways to make the right ones."
"It was my life — like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be."
"Run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal."
"My mom said there's a sunrise and a sunset every day and you can choose to be there or not. You can put yourself in the way of beauty."
"Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding"
"That's how we find our way outward and onward. By holding onto beauty hardest. By cradling it like the cure that it is. By making it realer than anything ever was. The rest is just monsters and ghosts."
"Believe in the integrity and value of the jagged path. We don't always do the right thing on our way to rightness."
"You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own."
"How wild it was, to let it be."
"Looking back at my younger self, that I'm not so different than I am now. I was always a seeker. I wanted very ambitiously to be a writer and what happened between now and then is that I continually threw myself in the way of those things that would help me become that, of doing and finding and learning from things that altered me along the way."
"You get to define the terms of your life."
"The place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. it's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light."
"Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was."
"Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig."
"The only way I've been able to stay informed without letting fury rule my life is to channel my rage into something that ultimately feels like love to me. The place I do that the best is in my writing. That's where I feel like I can tap into the power of story and maybe bring something good into the world."
"You can't replicate walking 94 days through the wilderness by yourself with a really heavy pack until you do it."