Quotes from Pam Houston

Nobody gets to have it all, not even Donald Trump. You will have one thing or another depending on what choice you make. Or you will have both things in limited amounts, and that might turn out to be perfect, just exactly the life you want.

I guess I don't believe you can have it all. I don't believe any of us can. In fact, I believe the very expression having it all is not only a myth but also a symptom of how sick we are in our contemporary culture. Nobody gets to have it all...You will have one thing or another depending on what choice you make. Or you will have both things in limited amounts, and that might turn out to be perfect, just exactly the life you want' (175).

I've been to a lot of school and read a lot of thick books, but at my very core there's a made-for-TV-movie mentality I don't think i will ever shake.

Find yourself a place in the universe,' she said, 'a place where the dirt feels like goodness under your feet. Take the right picture and a man will walk into it. If you can bear him even a little, then for a while let him stay.

There was something about the prairie for me—it wasn't where I had come from, but when I moved there it just took me in and I knew I couldn't ever stop living under that big sky.

If a situation requires swearing to God it is — by definition — extreme.

Love gets bigger after forty," Fenton tells me. "After forty,, love says, 'Come one, come all.

Like sometimes when you go to a movie and you get so lost in the story that when you're walking out of the theater you can't remember anything at all about your own life.

We call such a limited number of relationships love in our lives, but there is always love around us—it's as ubiquitous as oxygen.

I am walking down the street in Manhattan, Fifth Avenue in the lower sixties, women with shopping bags on all sides. I realize with some horror that for the last fifteen blocks I have been counting how many women have better and how many women have worse figures than I do. Did I say fifteen blocks? I meant fifteen years.

To the people in Creede I am intelligent, suspiciously sophisticated and elitist to the point of being absurd. To the people at UC Davis I am quaint, a little slow on the uptake and far too earnest to even believe.

Sometimes I'm afraid the main reason I spend half of my life outdoors is simply because there aren't any mirrors.

This is what you learned in college: A man desires the satisfaction of his desire; a woman desires the condition of desiring.

I have always believed that if I pay strict attention while I am out in the physical world—and for me that often meant the natural world—the physical world will give me everything I need to tell my stories" (78). —Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

Several times in my life, I've sat with women, friends of mine, who reveal, sometimes shyly, sometimes proudly, bruises of one kind or another, and I know I've said, "If it happens one time, leave him," I've said, "It doesn't matter how much you love him. Leave him if it happens one time." And I've said it with utter confidence, as if I knew what the hell I was talking about, as if violence was something that could be easily defined.

Could a person mourn and be joyful simultaneously? I understood it as the challenge of the twenty-first century. Maybe it was simply what being a grown up meant.

We are all dying, and because of us, so is the earth. That's the most terrible, the most painful in my entire repertoire of self-torturing thoughts. But it isn't dead yet and neither are we. Are we going to drop the earth off at the vet, say goodbye at the door, and leave her to die in the hands of strangers? We can decide, even now, not to turn our backs on her in her illness. We can still decide not to let her die alone.

I still don't see how it would make me feel any better to think of the pain in my hip and spine as anything other than my most loyal and valuable companion, the continuous nonvoice in my ear that says, You got out alive and you still get to go.

the purser has something resembling joy in her voice when she welcomes us to San Francisco. 'I probably don't need to tell you all to open the overhead bins with caution,' she says. 'If your contents haven't shifted, you must be carrying lead weights.

if climate change is our bubonic plague, that makes us the fleas and rats.

People are supposed to accumulate, I thought, as they get older, but I seem to be sloughing off, like a person wrapped in a hundred layers of cellophane, tearing one layer off at a time, trying to get down to me.

We are up in the attic doing a jigsaw puzzle, which may be the single fastest way one OCD person reveals herself to another.

I believe—like religion—that the glimmer, the metaphor, if you will, knows a great deal more than I do. And if I stay out of its way, it will reveal itself to me. I will become not so much its keeper as its conduit, and I will pass its wisdom on to the reader, without actually getting in its way" (79).

Remember this remember this remember this the next time you think it's over, because some man, or some hope, or some life takes away instead of gives. Remember this and get on an airplane, a small one if possible, because it always works.