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Top Dani Shapiro Quotes

Browse top 32 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Dani Shapiro.

Favorite Dani Shapiro Quotes

1. "How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'" ~ Dani Shapiro
2. "I started realising that the themes running through all of my novels were really haunting and obsessing me about my own life." ~ Dani Shapiro
3. "I used to act in television commercials when I was a kid and a young adult." ~ Dani Shapiro
4. "I'm an urban person who loves living in the country." ~ Dani Shapiro
5. "If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt; it has to be creative." ~ Dani Shapiro
6. "It's essential to have sacred time for writing. All successful authors have some daily commitment to keep on-track and moving forward." ~ Dani Shapiro
7. "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." ~ Dani Shapiro
8. "My desk is covered with talismans: pieces of rose quartz, wishing stones from a favorite beach." ~ Dani Shapiro
9. "My parents made the decision never to focus on my looks, and I had no sense of myself as beautiful." ~ Dani Shapiro
10. "Our minds have a tendency to wander. To duck and feint and keep us at a slight remove from the moment at hand." ~ Dani Shapiro
11. "Our pain is a part of who we authentically are." ~ Dani Shapiro
12. "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]" ~ Dani Shapiro
13. "As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness." ~ Dani Shapiro
14. "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?'" ~ Dani Shapiro
15. "When I sit down with my notebook, when I start scribbling words across the page, I find out what I'm feeling." ~ Dani Shapiro
16. "Confidence is highly overrated when it comes to creating literature. A writer who is overly confident will not engage in the struggle to get it exactly right on the page - but rather, will assume that she's getting it right without the struggle." ~ Dani Shapiro
17. "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." ~ Dani Shapiro
18. "I am devoted to my husband and son. I am devoted to the practices and rituals that imbue our lives with a sense of meaning and purpose, that help me to live my days in the most emotionally and intellectually productive manner. I am devoted to the idea of devotion itself." ~ Dani Shapiro
19. "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." ~ Dani Shapiro
20. "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." ~ Dani Shapiro
21. "It wasn't getting easier because it isn't supposed to get easier. Midlife was a bitch, and my educated guess was that the climb only got steeper from here. Carl Jung put it perfectly: "Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life," he wrote. "Worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will by evening have become a lie."... I was writing a new program for the afternoon of life. The scales tipped away from suffering and toward openheartedness and love. [p. 182]" ~ Dani Shapiro
22. "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." ~ Dani Shapiro
23. "According to ayurveda, we become what we surround ourselves with. And so it stands to reason that we have to be discerning about what we surround ourselves with." Steve Cope [p. 85]" ~ Dani Shapiro
24. "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." ~ Dani Shapiro
25. "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]" ~ Dani Shapiro
26. "I was longing for the moment I was in, even as I was in it." ~ Dani Shapiro
27. "This is in the natural order of things--the time of life we've now entered. The afternoon, as Jung called it. Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life. Are we unprepared simply because preparation is not possible? ... We learn--if we are lucky we learn--as we go.... we are in the center of the stream. Much has already happened, and has formed the shape of our lives as surely as water shapes rock. Much lies ahead of us. We can't see what's coming. We can't know it. All we have is our hope that all will be well, and our knowledge that it won't always be so. We live in the space between this hope and this knowledge....Life keeps coming at us. Fleeing it is pointless, as is fighting. What I have begun to learn is that there is value in simply standing there--this too--whether the sun is shining, or the wind whipping all around. [pp.239-240]" ~ Dani Shapiro
28. "We are tyrannized by our options." ~ Dani Shapiro
29. "And these years later, when I think of that essay, what I remember most is not the moment I saw my work in New Yorker font, not when I saw the illustration of my father, not the congratulatory phone calls and notes that followed, but that predawn morning in my bedroom, at my desk, the lights of cars below on Broadway, my computer screen glowing in the dark." ~ Dani Shapiro
30. "I try to remember that the job — as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy — of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it." ~ Dani Shapiro
31. "Gone was the reflexive need to see the worst in things. Before the tumors took her life, they gave her a few moments of grace." ~ Dani Shapiro
32. "Don't think too much. There'll be time to think later. Analysis won't help. You're chiseling now. You're passing your hands over the wood. Now the page is no longer blank. There's something there. It isn't your business yet to know whether it's going to be prize-worthy someday, or whether it will gather dust in a drawer. Now you've carved the tree. You've chiseled the marbled. You've begun." ~ Dani Shapiro

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Today's Quote

I think training of better Youth Coaches is essential."
Author: Arsene Wenger

What Did Dani Shapiro Talk About?

Wit
Here
Hen
Act
Thin
Ear
Ally
Son
Use
Per
Self
Tan
Win
Pen
Moment
Keep
Lit
Light
Word
Won
Boo
Wing
Call
Ways
Cause
Mean
Ten
Late
Start
Star
Writing

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