Quotes from Dani Shapiro

Knowing what you know, you're more of a daughter to Paul than you can possibly imagine. You take something that isn't your own and you breathe life into it. You create it—and it becomes your creation. You are an agent to help my brother express the finest kind of love.

What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are?

I believe he doesn't regret it. But still, has being with me stopped him from being him?

How can I tell her that her lists will not protect her?

But I think that at the moment of my death, I'd like to be looking at those pictures of everyone I have ever loved.

Donating sperm was not the same as, say, donating a kidney. Or a retina. It was the passing along of an essence that was inseparable from personhood itself.

ritual that allows me to enter a contemplative place—a place in which I might come upon something wordless and profound. Maybe the rituals are a doorway to prayer. But I spent most of my life confusing them with prayer itself.

I couldn't write. I grew tense. I was strangled by my own ego, by my petty desire for what I perceived to be the literary brass ring. I was missing the point, of course. The reward is in the doing.

If I'm not writing, my heart hardens, rather than lifts.

What never fail to draw me in, however, are secrets. Secrets within families. Secrets we keep out of shame, or self-protectiveness, or denial. Secrets and their corrosive power. Secrets we keep from one another in the name of love.

it feels as if mountain pose is the most challenging of all yoga poses. To be still. To be grounded. To claim one's place in the world.

I'm not giving you up," she said. The thin shell holding me together cracked, and suddenly I was weeping with my whole body. "And you'd better not be giving me up," she said. Every syllable, deliberate. "I'm not giving you up, Shirl," I sobbed. "I was so afraid that—" "I have fewer years ahead of me than behind me," she said. "And you are my brother's daughter.

Let the young soul look back upon its life and ask itself: what until now have you truly loved, what has raised up your soul, what ruled it and at the same time made it

But when the self—not a fictional character—is the landscape of the story, we can't afford to be blind to our own themes and the strands weaving through them. And so we must make a map, even as the ground shifts beneath us. This is, of course, not only a literary problem. —

Sometimes I think I have organized the inner crowd. For a brief, breathtaking moment, I feel completely whole. I understand that I am comprised of many selves that make up a single chorus. To listen to the music this chorus makes, to recognize it as music, as something noble, varied, patterned, beautiful — that is the work of a lifetime.

There must be that second, bobbing and darting in the aliveness of their shared history, unmistakable, glowing like a firefly in the darkness. If only they could pinpoint it and stop it there, right there, at the small but indelible spot that somehow they missed the first time around, if only, then perhaps their whole family could begin again.

There are a few people who will feel her touch—a chill up a spine, a hand in the air, a poem recalled—even if they won't exactly know it.

Adjectives have become verbs: I favorited it. Verbs have become nouns. How many likes do you have? Time is moving at such an accelerated rate that completing sentences now seems baroque.

I can't stand seeing their sympathy. For years, vital parts of me have been frozen, and since the accident I felt myself thawing, dripping, becoming more human than I can bear.

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

I want a stable man in my life. One who will be there, but will give me enough room to be free, to breathe, to live. And one I can love, but not sacrifice my soul for.

There is no other life than this. You would not have stumbled into the vastly imperfect, beautiful, impossible present.

A: "Nobody Knows It but Me" is by ad copywriter Patrick O'Leary. Many readers asked for the text. Here it is: "There's a place I travel when I want to roam, and nobody knows it but me. / The roads don't go there and the signs stay home, and nobody knows it but me. / It's far, far away and way, way afar. It's over the moon and the sea / and wherever you're going that's wherever you are. / And nobody knows it but me.

There is no permanent forgetting. Though the world of things is persuasive and distracting, the stories always come back, circled in neon. They are all the more alive for having been hidden.