Quotes from Pam Houston

I'm just saying, I guess, there's another version, after this version, to look forward to. Because of wisdom or hormones or just enough years going by. If you live long enough you quit chasing the things that hurt you; you eventually learn to hear the sound of your own voice.

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. It lives in the houses where we've slept, the kitchens where we've cooked, in the food we've prepared for the people we love and in the walls we have shaped with our hands.

I have spent most of my life outside, but for the last three years, I have been walking five miles a day, minimum, wherever I am, urban or rural, and can attest to the magnitude of the natural beauty that is left. Beauty worth seeing, worth singing, worth saving, whatever that word can mean now. There is beauty in a desert, even one that is expanding. There is beauty in the ocean, even one that is on the rise.

And even if the jig is up, even if it is really game over, what better time to sing about the earth than when it is critically, even fatally, wounded at our hands.

what if you could have all the wisdom of a lifetime and still look like you looked when you were twenty-five' 'or what?' I say. 'what, what' she says. I say, 'I thought we were playing Would You Rather...?' She twists her head like a dog at a foghorn. 'Marla,' I say, 'you get the wisdom because you don't anymore look like you did when you were twenty-five.' She says, 'You don't understand the rules to this game.

How to hang on to that full-body joy I knew I was capable of and still understand it as elegy.

but for the rest of my own life, I want to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief without

as long as we are living, there is always time to expand the story.

Guenevere brought me a cookie and a big box of Kleenex. She said that choices can't be good or bad. There is only the event and the lessons learned from it.

Boone was a hunter of the everything-has-to-be-hard-and-painful-to-be-good variety, and there was nothing he liked better than a six- or seven-hour belly crawl through the soggy green tundra.

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.

stampede strap

human spark plug, optimistic, intelligent, and energetic.

had been born knowing that if you held the proper measuring stick, animals would always test smarter than people, and nothing I've seen in my lifetime has disabused me of that notion. We may have more complicated language, opposable thumbs and this dangerous thing called reason, but any self-respecting llama or buffalo or spider knows enough not to destroy its own home.

When you do something nice for somebody, it is just like walking around a temple. It is just like saying a prayer.

But a broken heart—God knows, I have found—doesn't actually kill you. And irony and disinterest are false protections, ones that won't serve us, or the earth, in the end.

When you give yourself wholly to a piece of ground, its goodness enters your bloodstream like an infusion. You will never be alone the same way again, and never quite dislocated. Your heart will grow down into and back out of that ground like a tree.

In the beginning , Renato had said, all of the world was America .

Intuition is nothing more than the most likely junction of the thing called will and the thing called chance.

There is love in these old logs and in RJ's workmanship and I can feel it every time I walk inside. 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. It lives in the houses where we've slept, the kitchens where we've cooked, in the food we've prepared for the people we love and in the walls we have shaped with our hands.

You got some synchronicity happening in your life right now?

A photograph tells the story of two lives simultaneously, the one in front of the camera as well as the one behind.

If we abandon all hope right now, does that in some way protect us from some bigger pain later?

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.