Ariel Gore > Quotes

“The last introvert in a world of extroverts. Silence: my response to both emptiness and saturation. But silence frightens people. I had to learn how to talk. Out of politeness.”
― Ariel Gore, Atlas of the Human Heart

“That kind of thinking [that writers must alleviate their guilt for leading a creative life] is based on the idea that the creative life is somehow self-indulgent. Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world. William Carlos Williams said, "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." You can't eat a book, right, but books have saved my life more often than sandwiches. And they've saved your life... But we don't say, oh, Maya Angelou should have silenced herself because other people have other destinies. It's interesting, because artists are always encouraged to feel guilty about their work. Why? Why don't we ask predatory bankers how they alleviate their guilt? ”
― Ariel Gore

“Your heart is the size of your fist; keep loving, keep fighting.”
― Ariel Gore, Atlas of the Human Heart

“It is a great paradox and a great injustice that writers write because we fear death and want to leave something indestructible in our wake and, at the same time, are drawn to all the things that kill: whiskey and cigarettes, unprotected sex, and deep-fried burritos.”
― Ariel Gore

“When we strike a balance between the challenge of an activity and our skill at performing it, when the rhythm of the work itself feels in sync with our pulse, when we know that what we're doing matters, we can get totally absorbed in our task. That is happiness.

The life coach Martha Beck asks new potential clients, "Is there anything you do regularly that makes you forget what time it is?"

That forgetting -- that pure absorption -- is what the psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi calls "flow" or optimal experience. In an interview with Wired magazine, he described flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost."

In a typical day that teeters between anxiety and boredom, flow experiences are those flashes of intense living -- bright against the dull. These optimal experiences can happen when we're engaged in work paid and unpaid, in sports, in music, in art.

The researchers Maria Allison and Margaret Duncan have studied the role of flow in women's lives and looked at factors that contributed to what they call "antiflow." Antiflow was associated with repetitive household tasks, repetitive tasks at work, unchallenging tasks, and work we see as meaningless. But there's an element of chaos when it comes to flow. Even if we're doing meaningful and challenging work, that sense of total absoprtion can elude us. We might get completely and beautifully lost in something today, and, try as we might to re-create the same conditions tomorrow, our task might jsut feel like, well, work.

In A Life of One's Own, Marion Milner described her effort to re-create teh conditions of her own recorded moments of happiness, saying, "Often when I felt certain that I had discovered the little mental act which produced the change I walked on air, exulting that I had found the key to my garden of delight and could slip through the door whenever I wished. But most often when I came again the place seemed different, the door overgrown with thorns and my key stuck in the lock. It was as if the first time I had said 'abracadabra' the door had opened, but the next time I must use a different word. (123-124).”
― Ariel Gore, Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness

“Poet' had always sounded like a profession to me, or a talent. But the dead American [Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry] made it sound like a faith.”
― Ariel Gore, Atlas of the Human Heart

“Settling other people's land is an American tradition.”
― Ariel Gore, Atlas of the Human Heart

“All those people who rejected me gave me a head-start on freedom, because the fear and obedience we are all taught, well, those things weren't getting me any love.”
― Ariel Gore

“Maybe what shame needs to stay alive is the consent of the shamed.”
― Ariel Gore, We Were Witches

“Everything is freedom and everything is loneliness. Make your choice and let the rest fall away.”
― Ariel Gore

“Maybe it goes without saying that if you want to become a famous writer before you’re dead, you’ll have to write something. But the folks in my classes with the biggest ideas and the best publicity shots ready to grace the back covers of their best-selling novels are also usually the ones who aren’t holding any paper.”
― Ariel Gore, How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead: Your Words in Print and Your Name in Lights

“Nourish the world with your words, yo.”
― Ariel Gore, How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead: Your Words in Print and Your Name in Lights

“It's a great paradox and a great injustice that writers write because we fear death and want to leave something indestructable in our wake, and at the same time, are drawn to things that kill: whiskey and cigarette, unprotected sex and deep fried burritos.
It's true that you can get away with drinking and smoking and sunbathing when you're in your teens and twenties, and it's true that rock stars are free to die at twenty-nine, but a lit star needs a long life.”
― Ariel Gore, How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead: Your Words in Print and Your Name in Lights

“No one ever does the last thing on their list.”
― Ariel Gore

“I wanted to be a writer, so I became one. How? I wrote things down.”
― Ariel Gore

“With each beat, the heart pumps nearly three ounces of blood into the arteries--seventy-five to ninety gallons an hour when the body is at rest.”
― Ariel Gore, Atlas of the Human Heart

“I wondered at all the ways abuse invents us”
― Ariel Gore

“Looking out over that poisoned water, it seemed like such a scam of anti-earth abuser culture to teach people that they cause their own cancer with negative thinking. Maybe this desert lake had been guilty of negative thinking?”
― Ariel Gore, The End of Eve: A Memoir

“If you don't like the fairy tales you've been handed, Ariel, you don't have to conform to them. You can reauthor them. You can write your story however you choose.”
― Ariel Gore, We Were Witches

“I didn't know if the cure for my life was to lie to everyone about everything or to become brutally honest.”
― Ariel Gore

“You always thought older people were wiser. It's not that. It's just that our relatives are dead and we're able to speak freely.”
― Ariel Gore

“Maybe I could rewrite the fairy tale of my life, transforming every blow to the head, and every cut to the cunt, and every crucified doll into some kind of an initiation.”
― Ariel Gore, We Were Witches

“Shame can look a lot like rude.”
― Ariel Gore, We Were Witches

“Remember when we were witches.”
― Ariel Gore, We Were Witches

“Hochschild wonders about the false self we create when we turn our happiness on and off like a light, when we use emotion as a commodity in the workplace. As women, we were taught to use our emotions at home, too, as a service to our families.

... The manufacture of happiness actually leads to emotional burnout. There's an ironic correlation between forced cheerfulness and depression.

... Delta Airlines, which institutionalized positive emotional management in the 1970s, now spends nine million dollars a year paying for antidepressants for its employees and their dependents.

(Fuck Happiness, 64).”
― Ariel Gore

“I wanted to be the kind of writer who illuminated hidden injustice so starkly that it would simply cease to be perpetuated. If only people knew the government was retaking Native land! Everyone would be outraged! It hadn’t yet occurred to me that most people might feel fine about consciously exploiting other people.”
― Ariel Gore, We Were Witches