Shari > Shari's Quotes

“There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable”
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

“I worry that Jesus drinks himself to sleep when he hears me talk like this.”
― Anne Lamott

“When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He or She starts with an impossibility. ”
― Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

“If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.”
― Anne Lamott

“You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.”
― John Updike

“What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.”
― John Updike

“Since the world has changed so much, the same values don't lead to the same choices anymore.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“If nothing matters, there's nothing to save.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“And nothing inspires as much shame as being a parent. Children confront us with our paradoxes and hypocrisies, and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every why — Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that? — and often there isn’t a good one. So you say, simply, because. Or you tell a story that you know isn’t true. And whether or not your face reddens, you blush. The shame of parenthood — which is a good shame — is that we want our children to be more whole than we are, to have satisfactory answers.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“All of us are better when we're loved.”
― Alistair MacLeod

“Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.”
― Anne Michaels

“Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
”
― Jane Kenyon, Let Evening Come

“Did you not look upon the world this morning and imagine it as the boy might see it? And did you not recognize the mist and the dew and the birdsong as elements not of a place or a time but of a spirit? And did you not envy the boy his spirit? For you know there can be no power over him who freely gives what another would take. Such a one has the capacity to love. Freely, naively, to say I do.”
― Jamie O'Neill, At Swim, Two Boys

“I didn't know with certainty what to say about the large world, and didn't care to risk speculating. And I still don't. That we all look at it from someplace, and in some hopeful-useful way, is about all I found I could say--my best, most honest effort. And that isn't enough for literature, though it didn't bother me much. Nowadays, I'm willing to say yes to as much as I can: yes to my town, my neighborhood, my neighbor, yes to his car, her lawn and hedge and rain gutters. Let things be the best they can be. Give us all a good night's sleep until it's over.”
― Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

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

“The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.”
― Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

“I would guess, perhaps too optimistically, that nearly ever racist believes it is morally wrong to be racist. And since nearly every person thinks of themselves as being moral, then a racist must consciously and subconsciously employ tortured logic in order to explain away their racism--in order to believe themselves to be nonracist.”
― Sherman Alexie, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

“Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.”
― Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline