Quotes from Beth Kephart

Nobody knows (for real, for true) how hard someone is trying.

You obsess (but of course you obsess) until the joy is gone from that thing you'd loved, until your fury overwhelms your passion, until you no longer know how to sit with your back against a tree and write poetry that no one will ever see.

Teaching memoir is teaching vulnerability is teaching voice is teaching self.

Anna would say that she was a cat like Gemma, with nine lives to spend, all nine precious and delicious.

Explain little. Evoke all.

By thinking hard about how this artist sees, I learn more about my own seeing.

Because I was aware of all the mistakes I'd make, because he'd be aware, because pride got in the way, because he was already so much better than me at so many countable things.

Proficiency is not benevolence. There is an art to being present.

Here's the thing. Your idea of happiness is not my idea of happiness, and happiness is not something you can give me. Love is something you can give, and, Mom, you have loved me.

When fighting on behalf of someone you love, the fight must end, the love must be the art of being present.

Love is what you give and love is what you want and live is how you wait, but it doesn't save you

Make no mistake," the anthropologist Loren Eiseley once said. "Everything in the mind is in rat's country. It doesn't die.

Because sentences are for making," I finally said. "Sentences are the risks we take.

But alone with my prose I am maker and critic, teacher and student, lazy and specific. Alone with my prose I fail for days and sometimes years and over the course of many drafts. Incapable of finding the truth in memoir, I turn to fiction. Paralyzed by length, I turn to poems. Bucking against short lines I turn to prose again, to truth again, to nonsequential truth because that seems more truthful.

A memoir is never right. Nor is the memoirist.

there is only, in the end, give and take and yielding, the bending of your idea of your ideal toward the one who loves you.

The self is woke and abnegating, line crossing and navigating, more-or-less list making, marked by the immediate and bent by the scene, the superimposition of other people's dreams, and I remembered the essence of a note I had written to a former student, now a man: But might your happiness be more than all the ways you work to make other people happy? Might you soon belong to you?

A collection tells the story of the collector. A collection is a shoring up against the things that have gone missing. So much goes missing.

Might you soon belong to you?

But what does it mean to look after yourself? Your eyes on your own eyes? Your eyes on your own back? Your words conjuring a self-knowing, self-forgiving self? Might you soon belong to you?

It should be said that I love best the early-morning hours when my thoughts are my own. I love the scratched-glass bubble of a solo train ride. A solitary walk in search of turtle shells beside a lazy canal. This here and this now, this page, when memory is the other person in the room, the voice in my ear, the speculation.

We will learn portraiture from Hope Jahren. Landscape from Hisham Matar. The return to the past from Rebecca Mead. Summer from Terrence des Pres. The continuum of time from Sallie Tisdale:

Get out of the way of your story.

But the mind is rat's country. If you fall once you could fall again. If the world spins it could never stop spinning.