Dani Shapiro Quotes - Page 2

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.

What was going on inside of me became louder because everything around me became quieter.

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.

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.

In every generation there is a vault-keeper, one who guards the links fiercely and knows they are more precious than rubies.

We are tyrannized by our options.

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.

At some point each day (well, most days) I unroll my mat and practice for an hour. I sit in meditation for a while. This can be five minutes or twenty minutes, but the daily practice - simply showing up for it - is centering.

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.

In a creative journey, it is essential, no matter how far one runs, to examine that which is closest to home.

My desk is covered with talismans: pieces of rose quartz, wishing stones from a favorite beach.

I never feel so alive as when I'm writing and the work is going well.

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

Music inspires me and puts me in the right mood, but to actually listen to it when I write - I find it gets in the way.

I do strongly identify with being Jewish. I was raised Orthodox and had a childhood complicated by the fact that my father was deeply religious and my mother was not.

What's more important that spiritual life? It seems to me it's the bedrock of everything essential about being human.

When I sit down with my notebook, when I start scribbling words across the page, I find out what I’m feeling.

I do whatever is necessary in order to maintain the equanimity we all need to withstand the disappointment and rejection that are the lot of every writer, no matter where we are in our careers.

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?

From spiritual connection springs kindness, connection, social activism, and love.

I'm an urban person who loves living in the country.

Devotion, as it relates to the title of my memoir, means fidelity - as in fidelity to a person or a practice. I think it's certainly possible to feel devotion without having faith, at least in the religious sense of the word.

My parents made the decision never to focus on my looks, and I had no sense of myself as beautiful.

If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt; it has to be creative.

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.