Quotes from Nick Flynn

Maybe the silence you move through shaped me, the way a church bell ringing resonates long after the ear ceases to perceive it, the way waves space themselves until they stop. — Nick Flynn, from "Man Dancing with a Paper Cup," Some Ether: Poems . (Graywolf Press June 2, 2015)

it is the emptiness of the bowl that creates the bowl

How am I doing? He nods. I smile and turn the question over in my mind. I begin to point out that it isn't really the right question, but start to laugh before I can finish, and keep on laughing, a laughter that builds on it self. How am I doing? he might as well ask, Would you like more pebbles in your shoes, or Besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how'd you like the play?

disclaimer:This is a work of nonfiction, but it is also full of dreams, speculations, and shadows. Many names have been changed.

My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it. Part of why she left him was this delusion of greatness and identifying it very directly with being an artist.

I can weep pretty easily. I can get tears in my eyes from a beautiful work of art.

I had to steel myself against this psychic devastation - to see your father on the street. It's hard enough to pick up somebody you don't know from the streets, and then to actually have other people pick your father up - it was psychically devastating.

The only strategy I know of is to write every day, which I don't always do, because sometimes I just can't, for various reasons that seem out of my control.

If it had been a heart attack, the new

When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family.

Who doesn't want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float?

There are many ways to drown, only the most obvious wave their arms as they're going under.

Alcohol is the river we sit on the banks of, contemplating. Sometimes we watch ourselves float past, sometimes we watch ourselves sink.

Perhaps it is our fear, that in the silence between stories, in the moment of falling, the fear that we will never find the one story which will save us, and so we lunge for another, and we feel safe again, if only for as long as we are telling it.

Some part of me knew he would show up, that if I stood in one place long enough he would find me, like you're taught to do when you're lost. But they never taught us what to do if both of you are lost, and you both end up in the same place, waiting.

Perhaps everyone has a story that could break your heart...

In my experience, whatever happens clings to us like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing us slightly, both uglifying and giving us texture. You can scrape all you want, you can, if you have money, hire someone else to scrape, but the barnacles will come back or at least leave a blemish on the steel.

Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness. There exists a striking association between creativity and manic depression. Why are more creative people prone to madness? They have more than average amounts of energies and abilities to see things in a fresh and original way—then because they also have depression, I think they're more in touch with human suffering.

I know cigarettes can kill & wonder why she wants to die.

What you fear your whole life comes to pass. You end up living toward it, you spend your life running from it but your foot is nailed to the sidewalk. You circle around it until you wear yourself own.

By the time I make my way to the border of Mauritania, to the edge of the Sahara, I see no end to being lost. You can spend your entire life simply falling in that direction. It isn't a station you reach but just the general state of going down. Once you make it back, if you make it back, you will stand before your long-lost friends but in some essential way they will no longer know you.

By the time I'm nine I know the world is a dangerous place.  I've heard whispers about razorblades in apples, about Charlie Manson and his family.  But no one is offering any clear information.

We got him to talk to a psych doctor once, the doctor asked if he heard things other people don't. Sure, Paul answered, I hear birds in the morning when everyone's sleeping, I hear trees rustling when no one's around.

I'm fast becoming the one who leaves things behind