Dani Shapiro
There's something about urban life - you walk out your door, and you're in a steady of stream of life happening around you, and it's very easy to get caught up in that stream and simply kind of keep on moving.Collection: Moving
My son is now fourteen, and from the moment he was born, I understood that forevermore my heart would be walking around outside my body.Collection: Heart
I'll have my students try to follow their minds during the course of a day, just to see the way their minds work, the way our minds hop from thing to thing to thing. The Internet mirrors that to such a degree you can actually see it. Show me your search history and I'll show you who you are.Collection: Mirrors
I don't want to lean back into the past, or forward into the future. I don't want to wish the present moment away. The truth is in the present moment. The great paradox is that when I'm really able to do that, time slows down and opens up. Time feels suddenly and inexplicably without end.Collection: Past
Everything changes. The more I try to hold on to the moment, the more it slips through my fingers.Collection: Trying
There’s a great expression in Twelve Step programs: Act as if. Act as if you’re a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don’t wait for anybody to tell you it’s okay. Take that shimmer and show us our humanity. That’s your job.Collection: Beautiful
In a creative journey, it is essential, no matter how far one runs, to examine that which is closest to home.Collection: Running
What's more important that spiritual life? It seems to me it's the bedrock of everything essential about being human.Collection: Spiritual
From spiritual connection springs kindness, connection, social activism, and love.Collection: Spiritual
When I sit down with my notebook, when I start scribbling words across the page, I find out what I’m feeling.Collection: Notebook
Success is so fleeting, even if you get a good book deal or your book is a huge success, there's always the fear: What about the next one?Collection: Book
There are books that a writer undertakes because she wants to go on a journey, and there are journeys a writer undertakes because she wants to write a book.Collection: Book
Let me tell you something about hypochondria: It's a pernicious, undermining little demon. It won't kill you, but it will sap the color from your life so that in the loveliest moments, the moments of grace, you are hit with that whisper in your ear that takes it all away. I'm sick, I'm dying - I just don't know it yet.Collection: Color
In the country, I stopped being a person who, in the words of Sylvia Boorstein, startles easily. I grew calmer, but beneath that calm was a deep well of loneliness I hadn't known was there. ... Anxiety was my fuel. When I stopped, it was all waiting for me: fear, anger, grief, despair, and that terrible, terrible loneliness. What was it about? I was hardly alone. I loved my husband and son. I had great friends, colleagues, students. In the quiet, in the extra hours, I was forced to ask the question, and to listen carefully to the answer: I was lonely for myself. [p. 123]Collection: Country
A writer with her work needs to be like a dog with a bone all the time. She needs to know where she's hidden it. Where she's stored the good stuff. She needs to keep gnawing at it, even after all the meat seems to be gone. When a student of mine says (okay, whines) that she's impatient, or tired, or the worst: isn't it good enough? this may be harsh, but she loses just a little bit of my respect. Because there is no room for impatience, or exhaustion, or self-satisfaction, or laziness. All of these really mean, simply, that the inner censor has won the day.Collection: Dog
The truth is in the present moment.Collection: Moments
Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.Collection: Writing
Writing well involves walking the path of most resistance. Sitting still, being patient, allowing the lunatic dream to take shape on the page, then the shaping, the pencil on the page, breathing, slowing down, being willing–no, more than willing, being wide open–to press the bruise until it blossoms.Collection: Dream
This sadness wasn't a huge part of me--I wasn't remotely depressed--but still, it was like a stone I carried in my pocket. I always knew it was there. [p. 179]Collection: Sadness
I don't want to lean back into the past, or forward into the future. I don't want to wish the present moment away.Collection: Past
I had spent my childhood and the better part of my early adulthood trying to understand my mother. She had been an extraordinarily difficult person, spiteful and full of rage, with a temper that could flare, seemingly out of nowhere, scorching everything and everyone who got in its way. [pp. 40-41]Collection: Mother
Traces that live within us often lead us to our storiesCollection: Stories
We can't protect ourselves from pain and heartache. In fact, to love - fully, madly, deeply - is the ensure heartache some day.Collection: Pain
Part of my spiritual work is learning to live with the knowledge that we can't protect our loved ones from pain and heartache.Collection: Spiritual
Recognize the possibility of the divine in any given moment.Collection: Moments
It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters.Collection: Distance
Michael Lowenthal has written a big-hearted and wise book about familial love in all its richness and complexity.Collection: Wise
When I near the end of a book, it feels as if the entire universe meets me more than halfway and supports me. The whole world seems to shimmer when I find the words. My mind quiets.Collection: Book
Maggie Shipstead takes hold of the reader and doesn't let go. Astonish Me is a haunting, powerful novel.Collection: Letting Go
With tremendous clarity and wisdom, Daniel Tomasulo has crafted a memoir at once heartbreaking and uplifting. Layers of time and memory—childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle age—are so beautifully revealed here, a trenchant reminder that our pasts are alive inside of us. There are psychologists who can write, and writers who can psychologize, but rarely have the two met on the page with such moving, profound results.Collection: Uplifting
I’ve discovered that my best work comes from the uncomfortable but fruitful feeling of not having a clue – of being worried, secretly afraid, even convinced that I’m on the wrong track.Collection: Track
I could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working.Collection: Years
I needed to slow down and quiet down deeply into a lot of these questions, yet at the same time what I was looking for, and continue to, is a way to have this exist within a regular, normal, modern life.Collection: Modern Life