Quotes from Dani Shapiro

WHEREVER I AM, I AM WHAT IS MISSING.

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

The nature of trauma is that you have no recollection of it as a story.

All my life I had known there was a secret. What I hadn't known: the secret was me.

Except that secrets, particularly the most deeply held ones, have a way of leaching into everything surrounding them.

What she doesn't realize is that I have survived for her as well -- and only now am I beginning to survive for myself.

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.

It wasn't scary. I mean, it was scary being in the dark and cold and everything, but when the lady, Mrs. Wilf, died, it was like everything had no beginning, and no end. Like we were lightyears away and here, all at the same time.

I clung to the only story I could tolerate.

course, if you haven't received

Moments appear like scattered puzzle pieces. What belongs to what? Where are the corners? I can hold only bits and pieces in my hands, and even these are suspect. I can't bring my parents close. It's not possible to sit them back down again and ask them: What happened? Did you ever love each other? When did you stop? Your legacy is a daughter who tries and tries to remember you.

The nature of trauma," van der Kolk had said, "is that you have no recollection of it as a story. The nature of traumatic experience is that the brain doesn't allow a story to be created.

She is practicing, because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art.

grief—particularly the phenomenon known as complicated grief—runs its own course in its own time.

He was a husband. There is a name for what he is now. Widower. He had never fully appreciated, in all the years he took patients' medical histories, how it must feel to check that box.

Let me fall if I must fall. The one I will become will catch me." —THE BAAL SHEM TOV

She doesn't know how to talk about herself. She is very, very good at telling other people's stories. She is known, as a producer, to be an unusually good reader of scripts when it comes to character and motivation. She has an excellent sense of structure. But her cheeks redden and she stumbles when she tries to share in meetings. It's as if the whole of her life rushes in, and she doesn't know where to begin.

of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land.

classically, naming a child is an opportunity for self-reflection.

You live for it. Like falling in love, moments that announce themselves as your subject are rare, and there's a magic to them. Ignorr them at your own peril.

They stay like this, two bodies so at home with each other that it is as if each of them had grown and shifted to accommodate the other's shape over the years, like two grafted trees.

You live for it. Like falling in love, moments that announce themselves as your subject are rare, and there's a magic to them. Ignore them at your own peril.

Somewhere, a clock ticks. Sand pours through the hourglass. I am no longer interested in the stories but rather, what is underneath the stories: the soft, pulsating thing that is true.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.