Quotes from Gail Godwin

The human mind, as we know from personal experience, is a chronic time traveler, but we are repeatedly amazed by its ability to hitch up the body, the body that resides the only place it can— in present time— and pull it along like a wagon, with its entire load of sensory equipment, backward or forward into other time zones.

The person in the song is really addressing a powerful and constant state of yearning more than he is any real lover. It's the state of this yearning that torments him, yet he also loves his torment. He needs it. Because he understands that being able to feel this yearning so exquisitely is his secret strength.

The more you respect and focus on the singular and the strange, the more you become aware of the universal and infinite.

A person always has control over how she meets her adversities, and the good news is that the facing of them, one after another, year after year, builds an inner strength that nobody can take away from you.

Then he laughed, his typical laugh. Making me wish i had ten more such anectodes stashed away to keep him standing there, holding onto me and laughing.

This week I've learned that when you really love someone, you come to accept everything about them, all the moments in their history that have made them into just what they are. And I can accept everything in your past, because it has made you you .

But what we ought to fear is the kind of death that happens in life. It can happen at any time. You're going along, and then, at some point, you congeal. You know, like jelly. You're not fluid anymore. You solidify at a certain point and from then on your life is doomed to be a repetition of what you have done before.

As long as you can go on creating new roles for yourself, you are not vanquished.

But the son whips out a Bayer aspirin, the father rises to his feet, embraces the son, and Technicolor is restored to their lives.

During the act of writing I have told myself something that I didn't know I knew.

How glibly and thoughtlessly that phrase 'make us grow' slides off our tongues. As if growth were always a happy, shapely matter: leaves unfurling, blossoms opening, hearts and minds joyously stretching toward more light. Whereas the fact of the matter was, when we asked for growth, we were asking for a mess. Exploding tempers, privately nursed little petri dishes of resentments, insecure stumblings into dangerous new places.

The walk north was exactly the right distance to make me walk out of myself....If you walked out of yourself going north, what did you do on the return walk? Enjoyed my emptiness. Or sometimes just congratulated myself for escaping.

When I was in seminary," Father Edward had told other guests around the table when he was purchasing his books, "my spiritual director told me not to read theology. 'Read novels,' he said, and I have.

Yes, if you believed in words, if you lived by words, you had better be careful which words you say and how you say them. You had better be careful what you look up, which words, which names. Jane Clifford, in The Odd Woman

Nonie often remarked that every one of us needed to get away from other people and replenish our personal reserves.

It was more like I saw him coming and knew he was the one. I went out of myself to meet him and then couldn't get back inside without bringing him with me.

Not everybody gets to grow up. First you have to survive your childhood, and then begins the hard work of growing into it.

In friendships . . . the requisits are always the same. Each provides the other with a refuge in time of trouble, with a continuum to fall back on in time of self-doubt, with an underpinning of earned trust upon which it is possible to build new achievements.

Remorse went out of fashion around the same time that "Stop feeling guilty," and "You're too hard on yourself," and "You need to love yourself more" came into fashion.

These days won't last forever. No days ever do, though sometimes it's hard to convince oneself of that.

How easy it was to make people happy, when you didn't want or need anything from them.

I believe that dreams transport us through the underside of our days, and that if we wish to become acquainted with the dark side of what we are, the signposts are there, waiting for us to translate them.

The best antidote I have found is to yearn for something. As long as you yearn, you can't congeal: there is a forward motion to yearning.

I believe that with enough practice and good faith, you can learn to recognize when the work is achieved.