Quotes from Dani Shapiro

Each fork in the road: the choice to stay home, to go out, to catch the flight, or cancel it, to take the 1 train, to stop at the bar on the corner. The chance encounters, split-second decisions that make the design—that are the design.

One afternoon I opened an email from her that included a passage from the work of Pema Chodron, a Buddhist teacher and writer whom I had long admired. To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land.

I want to bless that young couple as they cross Union Square. I want to deliver some kind of benediction upon them as—drunk on love—they meander the narrow streets of Alphabet City. I want to suggest that there will come a time when they will need something more than love.

For years we had the persistent sensation in our life and art - John Updike's phrase - that we were just beginning.

The constitutional disease from which I suffer," wrote the philosopher and psychologist William James, "is what the Germans call Zerrissenheit, or torn-to-pieces-hood. The days are broken in pure zig-zag and interruption.

Could Have" by the Polish Nobel Laureate Wis?awa Szymborska: "It could have happened. / It had to happen. / It happened earlier. Later. / Nearer. Farther off. / It happened, but not to you." The poet goes on to contemplate the nature of luck. "You were in luck—there was a forest. / You were in luck—there were no trees. / You were in luck—a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake, / a jamb, a turn, a quarter-inch, an instant.

It's possible to grow up in the wrong house, on the wrong street, in the wrong town, in the wrong part of the country. It's possible to go to the wrong school. To have the wrong dad. To be pushed to do the wrong things. But it is also possible to survive all these psychic indignities if you have one, maybe two people who recognize you for who you are.

think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be," wrote Joan Didion in her essay "On Keeping a Notebook," "whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, and who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

She numbs her feelings, because they are bigger than she is.

late at night once

Sometimes people suggested that I must have an amazing memory—that surely I must recall so many scenes, moments, sensory details from my early years. But the truth is that I have a terrible memory. I struggled to access any of my childhood or even my teenage years. I had no recollection of it as a story. And so I followed my own line of words to see where it would lead me.

She'd also read up on neuroplasticity. Theo had always lagged behind, in terms of his emotional agility

Everybody is begotten and points backwards, deeper down in the depths of beginnings, the bottoms and abysses of the well of the past.

Would it always matter? Lines from a Delmore Schwartz poem come to mind: "What am I now that I was then? / May memory restore again and again / The smallest color of the smallest

What if I had always known that the reason I looked different and felt different was in fact because I was different? It would be easy to fantasize that this would have been better. But we can never know what lies at the heart of the path not taken.

My life is a museum," says my ninety-one-year-old aunt. "I can walk through any of the galleries at any time.

secret wears away at a family until it is very nearly destroyed; parents with the best of intentions make selfish decisions affecting the fate of their child.

It would be easy to fantasize that this would have been better. But we can never know what lies at the end of the path not taken. Other difficulties, other heartaches, other complexities would certainly have emerged. But at least we would have been a family traversing them together.

morning was true will by evening have become a lie.

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.

He's been reading James Gleick, and repeats a passage to Ben by heart. "If only time could be seen whole, then you could see the past remaining intact, instead of vanishing in the rearview mirror.

Reading is an exercise in empathy. To read is to enter another world in a way different from any other art form.

They shake hands and all my past selves stretch between them like a fragile chain of paper dolls.

I was in the middle of my second novel and struggling. Instead of engagement, I felt a nagging worry. Had I lost my way? Maybe I had taken a wrong turn—but where? One afternoon, I met a friend of mine, a poet and novelist, for coffee. "I feel like I'm in a boat in the middle of the ocean and there's no land in sight," I told him. He took a sip of his drink and peered at me over his glasses. "Yeah," he said. "And you're building the boat.