Quotes from Pat Schneider

Even those truths that are painful will ultimately increase my wisdom, undergird my strength, make possible my art.

Writing as an art form belongs to all people, regardless of economic class or educational level. . . . A writer is someone who writes.

To grow in craft is to increase the bredth of what I can do, but art is the depth, the passion, the desire, the courage to be myself and myself alone.

It is a kind of love, is it not? How the cup holds the tea, How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare, How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes Or toes. How soles of feet know Where they're supposed to be. I've been thinking about the patience Of ordinary things, how clothes Wait respectfully in closets And soap dries quietly in the dish, And towels drink the wet From the skin of the back. And the lovely repetition of stairs. And what is more generous than a window?

I learned without her saying a word that there are truly many ways to pray, and lighting a candle is one of them.

Be led by your joy.

What a pity. How the stars and seas and rivers in their fragile lace of fog go on without us morning after morning, year after year. And we disappear.

Putting words onto paper—when it is done as an honest act of search or connection, rather than as an act of manipulation, performance, self-aggrandizement or self-protection—is a holy act.

Writing and prayer are both a form of love, and love takes courage.

Both writing and praying are acts of deep vulnerability.

I go fishing in my mind. I put out bait, the bait of my own longing, my desire, and my hunger for connection, for a tug of something alive at the end of a line. Something that I may have to struggle with to pull in, but that will be wild and important to me, whether I keep it or let it go.

The more we open ourselves to love, the larger our capacity for love becomes.

If I am an artist, I have a vocation. As one drawn to a lover or called to a religious mission, I go to my work—my writing—because it is essential to my happiness.

God's love is God's attention.

Surprise is a major factor in distinguishing an answer to prayer from a projection of my own mental processes. When I can't believe I made up the answer myself, I have to look around to see where it came from.

Jesus said, "But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.

Writing is an animal that lives in the soul. It must not be whipped into doing tricks. It is not a circus animal. It can be fierce, but it is not malevolent. It can be playful, but it is not without wisdom. Above all, it is wild. A wild animal has to sleep sometimes. This is a time of deep sleep for my writing.

I am like you, curious and small. Like you, I pause alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun's slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved."5

It occurred to me that when I begin to write, I open myself and wait. And when I turn toward an inner spiritual awareness, I open myself and wait.

She begins, "What is the question we spend our entire lives asking?" and answers, "Our question is this: Are we loved? I don't mean by one another." She closes her sermon to the snakes with these words: "I am like you, curious and small. Like you, I pause alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun's slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved.

The self you leave behind is only a skin you have outgrown. Don't grieve for it. Look to the wet, raw, unfinished self, the one you are becoming. The world, too, sheds its skin: politicians, cataclysms, ordinary days.

Maybe the bottom of my own night is a darkness I cannot descend into without "the light that is within me" becoming dark.

Darkness and light are inextricably bound together.

But if you worry about other people as you write a first draft, you will not be able to free your unconscious mind to give up its treasures. It will be bound by the great dogs of your fear,