Quotes from Beth Kephart

Memoir is the life wanting to be transformed. It is the life we have been waiting for.

We chase the mysteries we can't solve, the ghosts we will not meet, the cajolery of the stories we must fabricate ourselves, the ironic icon.

What," I ask from my seat in the front where I can't see him, "is the secret of our marriage?" Bill says nothing. The sun is a blade. I snag the stalks of the lilies with my dragonfly wings. "I think it's that the longer you stay," he says, finally, "the more you will stay.

Memories haunt. So do fears that you don't know half the things you are supposed to know since your name now sits on the jackets of some books. I had come to books in autodidact fashion, with a handful of workshops tossed in. What course could I teach? What were to be the rules? From what hollow in what bone was I to extract the necessary charm, the more necessary authority? I had no mystique and no defense against my own uncertainty and yet months of indecision melted into yes.

I became a teacher again, a teacher who finally understood that there's only so much you can teach. The excellence lives in the students themselves. The excellence is theirs alone to give.

memoir is the life we have been waiting for.

Teaching is the parenthetical hold, the instant of discovery, left to the instant.

Teaching is structure, teaching is the room we build for the students who will come and then slip through—in and out, on their way to other places, other rooms, other stories, other teachers, other teachings. Your students will find you, they will watch you, they will ask you, they will read with you, they will escape you, they will transcend you, they will replace you, they will become their own instructor, the most potent person in their room.

Throughout her life, Henriette Wyeth has to decide: Love or work. Fidelity or freedom. Beauty or snark. East or west. Her father's daughter or her husband's wife. Her children's mother or her artist's heart—her palette or her paint, her feathers or her shells.

She will be mired in responsibilities that are not of her own making. She will charm, and beneath her charm, she will regret.

You will write toward truth but even then you will be lying. For writing freezes what was in time, and time cannot be frozen, and what is here on this page will be left on this page, and you will keep on moving. Over hills. And through cracked valleys.

You have to believe that, someday, you will be your own second coming.

You think of the courage it takes to be anyone at all and anyone, especially, on the page.

words exclaimed in an empty room are pure self-conscience, the narcissist's folly.

You have to know your subject," he said. "You have to know what cannot be forgotten.

I think that marriage, a long marriage, cannot allow itself to grow old. I think that love is anything but indifference.

Just us, just them, and the ache of their lives, the ache to put their lives on the page, the ache to count. Writing as a way of counting. Teaching as an invitation.

Use the distance between the facts and your yearning to change those facts as your personal redemption.

Meander within the space of insufficient evidence.

Use your imagination as an arrow hurtling back toward what might have been or will never be.

Make your readers the agents of empathy.

You know how a river goes on and on? That's my love for you.

Nothing erodes [a mother's love]. It is not sand on a beach. It is the nuclear heart of things-hard as the rock of this earth.

In high school, my desire for friendship far outweighed my talent for it.