Quotes from Pam Houston

I've always said the toughest thing about learning to feel your feelings is that then you have to feel your feelings.

Dogs change lives. Half Buddha, half Bozo, they keep us tethered to the earth, and teach us to fly. Our dogs are our sanity keepers.

Life gives us what we need when we need it; receiving what it gives us is a whole other thing.

My parents were travelers. Every time my parents got ten dollars ahead they went somewhere. That's what they did. So I got the bug from them.

I'm not very interested in telling the facts. I have a lot of investment in telling the truth.

I wanted her to see that the only life worth living is a life full of love; that loss is always part of the equation; that love and loss conjoined are the best opportunity we get to live fully, to be our strongest, our most compassionate, our most graceful selves.

Life gives us what we need when we need it; receiving what it gives us is a whole other thing.

It's September 21st, a day I love for the balance it carries with it.

I always tell my students, about the biggest baddest things in life you must try to write small and light, save the big writing for the unexpected tiny thing that always makes or breaks a story.

Do you write novels? I said. Novels, Lord no, she said. I can't even stay married.

I will never regret not having children. What I regret is that I live in a world where in spite of everything, that decision is still not quite okay.

The Universe has a plan to make sure we don't ever stop learning, not only in our minds, but also in our hearts.

There are three principles to remember if you are to teach a human being anything, and they are consistency, consistency, consistency.They are such fragile creatures to begin with, with poor eyes, poorer hearing, and no sense of smell left to speak of, it's no wonder they are made of fear. Some centuries ago they moved inside and with that move went nine-tenths of their intuition. It is almost unmerciful to make them live so long when they spend their lives in so much pain.

Somewhere in the process I started writing toward an answer to the question I wake up with every morning and go to bed with every night. How do I find hope on a dying planet, and if there is no hope to be found, how do I live in its absence? In what state of being? Respect? Tenderness? Unmitigated love? The rich and sometimes deeply clarifying dreamscape of vast inconsolable grief?

How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us. But we have to ask with an open heart, with no idea what the answer will be.

It's hard for anybody to put their finger on the moment when life changes from being something that is nearly all in front of you to something that happened while your attention was elsewhere.

For the people of my country, Renato said, water is everything: love, life, religion... even God. It is like that for me too, I said. In English we call that a metaphor. Of course, said Renato, and water is the most abundant metaphor on earth.

Writers, it is said, all carry a chip of ice in their hearts

When you look into your baby's eyes," my friend Sarah once said to me, "that will become your Tibet." I have no doubt that looking into one's own baby's eyes is many inexpressibly wonderful things, but one thing it is not is Tibet.

I'm beginning to understand that when we want to kill ourselves, it is not because we are lonely, but because we are trying to break up with the world before the world breaks up with us.

For a long time I thought the object of the game was identifying the question, love versus freedom, Mandela vs Buthelezi, leave or stay forever ghosted under a thick curtain of oil. Nora said, Maybe a choice isn't the right way to think of it, by which she might have meant, A question loses its power when there is only one answer, as in, yes to Bhutan and Barstow. Yes to chanterelles and portobellos. A temple. Yes. A mosque. Yes. The changeable heart of a child.

His name was Zeke, short for Ezekiel. She asked him if he was religious, he said only about certain things.

The more important question, of course, was what the new Lucy would do, and even though I was pretty sure the old Lucy wouldn't be around much anymore, I was a little bit afraid the new Lucy hadn't yet shown up.

The language of the wilderness is the most beautiful language we have and it is our job to sing it, until and even after it is gone, no matter how much it hurts.