Quotes from Dani Shapiro

I try to remember that the job — as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy — of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.

If only time could be seen whole, then you could see the past remaining intact, instead of vanishing in the rearview mirror.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror," Rilke wrote. Nearly

I don't want to be a presentist," the author was saying. Presentism: the anachronistic introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past.

I have been writing all my life. Growing up, I wrote in soft-covered journals, in spiral-bound notebooks, in diaries with locks and keys. I wrote love letters and lies, stories and missives. When I wasn't writing, I was reading. And when I wasn't writing or reading, I was staring out the window, lost in thought. Life was elsewhere-I was sure of it-and writing was what took me there.

Do you know the three great spiritual questions? he asked...Who am I?...Why am I here?...And how shall I live?

From Carl Jung: "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate." —

Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

There's a great expression in Twelve Step programs: Act as if. Act as if you're a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don't wait for anybody to tell you it's okay. Take that shimmer and show us our humanity. That's your job.

But gratitude and trauma weren't mutually exclusive.

Write the words The FIve Senses on an index card and tack it to a bulletin board above your desk. You should have a bulletin board above your desk, if at all possible. Some place where you can tack images, quotes, postcards, scraps of thoughts and ideas that will help remind you of you you are and what you're doing.

Apparently, using two spaces after a period has become anachronistic. But tell that to my right thumb. —

You know," my aunt says, "I once had a terribly difficult period that lasted twenty-four years." Wait. Twenty-four years? "And it was so important to realize that I didn't know what was on the other side of the darkness. Every so often there was a sliver of light that shot the whole world through with mystery and wonder, and reminded me: I didn't have all the information.

Christopher Bollas, writes: "There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.

If I waited to be in the mood to write, I'd barely have a chapbook of material to my name. Who would ever be in the mood to write? Do marathon runners get in the mood to run? Do teachers wake up with the urge to lecture? I don't know, but I doubt it. My guess is that it's the very act that is generative. The doing of the thing that makes possible the desire for it.

But today, something begins to shift. I see that there might be some way I can take the raw material of my life and transform it into something that has order and structure. I can make sense of what, until now, has been senseless.

Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly.

While in Aspen, I was on a panel one evening with Andre Dubus III, who spoke of what happens when a memoir devolves into self-pity: "Wah, wah, wah. Should we call the wambulance?

How do you suppose time works? A slippery succession of long hours adding up to ever-shorter days and years that disappear like falling dominoes?

Form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings." —

I've learned to be wary of those times when I think I know what I'm doing. I've discovered that my best work comes from the uncomfortable but fruitful feeling of not having a clue...

Either all of us are accidents of history or none of us are.

My newfound awareness was both gauntlet and gift. The choice wasn't to see it as one or the other. It was to embrace both.

Our shared vocabulary—our own language—will die with us. We are the treasure itself: fathoms deep, in the world we have made and made again.