Quotes from Pat Schneider

To pray is to open oneself completely, intimately, into the Presence that is beyond our ability to name.

Follow, poet, follow right to the bottom of the night. I have no choice but to pursue the deepest truth my life has given me.

The panther that has stalked you since you were a child is old now. No longer wild, and tired of guarding the treasure you yourself left behind - blind and deaf, she will give it all to you if you just let her go.

Martha Graham, speaking to dancers, could have been speaking to any artist, any writer: There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening which is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist.

In writing, we see, sometimes with fear and trembling, who we have been, who we really are, and we glimpse now and then who we might become.

American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our lives eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.8

It is a kind of love, is it not? How the cup holds the tea, How the chair stands sturdily and foursquare, How the floor received the bottoms of shoes or toes.

My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight. Eudora Welty

There is a last word to be said about the fairy tale. The old woman sends the soldier down into the deep darkness, promising him treasure, but telling him to bring back to her just one thing: an old tinder box. He succeeds, but instead of giving it to her, he kills the old woman and goes off to have his own adventures with the box and the magical genie inside. This is a complicated ending, but worth pondering.

If, however, we take the story as a metaphor for the journey of the writer/artist, perhaps it is telling us that a time comes when we must take what we have learned, but go on without our parents, our teachers, our mentors, those who first showed us the way. We must go beyond at least some of our companions. And that necessary individuation—that breaking free—is sometimes very hard, sometimes even psychologically violent.

Something in me that was broken, cracked—becomes whole. The cracks, if I write them with utter honesty, are where "the light gets in." The present meets the past, and healing begins.

are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground

I have come to understand, through my own writing and through working with other writers, that fear is a friend of the writer. Where there is fear, there is buried treasure. Something important lies hidden—something that matters—like the angel waiting in the stone that Michelangelo began to carve.

That first voice, the voice of home, is the one the writer must protect from the contempt or disdain or disregard of any critic, no matter how famous or capable that critic may be. It is not all that a mature writer needs; surely every writer needs the tools of literary criticism and as much knowledge of various traditions as possible—but a profound acceptance of and trust in one's own voice is the first and most important thing the writer needs.

Maybe she is right. Maybe the old self has to die for the new self to be born. Or maybe, for me, the old self doesn't have to die. Maybe who I have been is not erasable on the tablet of who I am, or in the book of who I will become. Maybe writing, like painting, can be pentimento—one layer over another, the early layers now and then showing through.

Writing is often a struggle between the personal and the universal, and the way writers deal with that struggle varies.

The issue for me, both as a writer and as a spiritual seeker, is courage—the courage to be there myself, and the courage to allow the reader to be there—to see, to touch, to taste, to smell,

human suffering is the price we pay for freedom—our own, and the freedom of others. We are free to make mistakes, free to be cruel or kind, free to hurt or help one another. We are free in a dangerous world;

It is what we love the most / can make us most afraid

American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our lives eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.