Don't Be a Stranger Quotes

“She also once had the feeling she could write all day, words spilling in a waterfall, both foamy and clear, pouring into a green pool, out of her pen onto the paper. The only thing then which kept her from writing constantly was the nervous recognition that she'd miss the things other people were doing and become even more separated from life than she already felt herself to be. To stay so much in the world of writing she would not learn about the world, and she had a lot to learn. How could she write without learning how to live. The netherworld of writing offered a suspension in reverie, but she was just as interested in engaging, watching people in action, seeing new places, studying whatever was in front of her.
Shed learned that if she didn't make the effort to engage with that world, shed lose her connection to it, lose her ability to be with the people in it and to love them, and possibly vanish in a mist.”
― Susan Minot, Don't Be a Stranger

“Why did you have to have the wits scared out of you to feel sharp, to be content with being alive?

People, she saw, were brave and good and kind. She saw life was more astonishing and radiant than she'd imagined it, and she'd spent a lot of time imagining. Out in the hall she heard a bed rolling by. She was not aware of when she fell asleep; we never are.”
― Susan Minot, Don't Be a Stranger

“He who binds himself to a joy Does the winged life destroy But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sunrise.”
― Susan Minot, Don't Be a Stranger