Quotes from Dani Shapiro

A writer afraid of her own subject- whatever it might be- is a frozen creature, trapped in the inessential. Diminished.

It's wonderful to be loved but its profound to be understood.

Oh, child! Somewhere inside you, your future has already unfurled like one of those coiled-up party streamers, once shiny, shaken loose, floating gracefully for a brief moment, now trampled underfoot after the party is over. The future you're capable of imagining is already a thing of the past.

The hidden disaster was secrecy, the pretense and magical thinking, the certainty that no one ever needed to know.

It is a measure of true adulthood that we are able to imagine our parents as the people they may have been before us.

This is a work of nonfiction.

When it comes to the practice of writing, it cannot be distraction that propels us but rather the patience—the openness, the willingness—to meet ourselves on the page. To stop being at the mercy of what we surround ourselves with, but rather, to discover our story.

If it wasn't thought, it wasn't so. If it wasn't spoken, it hadn't happened. Except that secrets, particularly the most deeply held ones, have a way of leaching into everything surrounding them.

They aren't there for posterity. Nor for reference. I don't believe the young woman who wrote them has anything to teach me. What does she know? She hasn't lived my life.

The psychoanalyst who coined it, 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.

A psychoanalytic phrase—"unthought known"—became my instrument of illumination as I poked and prodded at my history with my parents. The psychoanalyst who coined it, Christopher

I've discovered that my best work comes from the uncomfortable but fruitful feeling of not having a clue – of being worried, secretly afraid, even convinced that I'm on the wrong track.

Part of my spiritual work is learning to live with the knowledge that we can't protect our loved ones from pain and heartache.

Moving to the country has been incredibly good for my work, for my sense of perspective.

My journals were a clearing house - a garbage can. Once I was writing seriously, I understood that this was the stuff that didn't belong in my work.

I never feel so alive as when I'm writing and the work is going well.

I do strongly identify with being Jewish. I was raised Orthodox and had a childhood complicated by the fact that my father was deeply religious and my mother was not.

My dad died when I was 23. His death was sudden and shocking - the result of a car crash - and I never got to say goodbye.

With each book you write you have to learn how to write that book - so every time, you have to start all over again.

Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write

This sadness wasn't a huge part of me--I wasn't remotely depressed--but still, it was like a stone I carried in my pocket. I always knew it was there. [p. 179]

When I think of the wisest people I know, they share one defining trait: curiosity. They turn away from the minutiae of their lives-and focus on the world around them. They are motivated by the desire to explore the unfamiliar. They are drawn toward what they don't understand.

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.

I believe that we don't choose our stories," she began, leaning forward. "Our stories choose us." She paused and took a sip of water. Her hand, I noticed was steady.. "And if we don't tell them, then we are somehow diminished.