Great Throughts Treasury

"When you can step back at moments like these and see what is happening, when you watch people you love under fire or evaporating, you realize that the secret of life is patch patch patch. Thread your needle, make a knot, find one place on the other piece of torn cloth where you can make one stitch that will hold. And do it again. And again. And again."

"When you don't have enough or you run out, you feel in your core that the leak has begun and there will be no end to the leakage. And this makes you feel like a chump. Whereas having some money gives you the conviction that you're not naked in the howling wind, even though you basically are, existentially."

"When you?re kind to people, and you pay attention, you make a field of comfort around them, and you get it back?the Golden Rule meets the Law of Karma meets Murphy?s Law."

"When you love something like reading?or drawing or music or nature?it surrounds you with a sense of connection to something great. If you are lucky enough to know this, then your search for meaning involves whatever that Something is. It?s an alchemical blend of affinity and focus that takes us to a place within that feels as close as we ever get to home. It?s like pulling into our own train station after a long trip?joy, relief, a pleasant exhaustion."

"When you're dreaming, you're not the one calling the shots. So it's a reprieve."

"whenever the world throws rose petals at you, which thrill and seduce the ego, beware. The cosmic banana peel is suddenly going to appear underfoot to make sure you don?t take it all too seriously, that you don?t fill up on junk food."

"When you make friends with fear, it can?t rule you."

"Who as a young person, like me, accepted being alone quite a lot. I think that this sort of person often becomes either a writer or a career criminal."

"While it is hard to fathom who we are and how we are to live when public chaos shatters our routine, the slow-motion pain of each private death and cataclysm we endure is harder. Each slams us off our feet, yet we have agreed to pretend to be fine again at some point, ideally as soon as possible, so as not to seem self-indulgent or embarrass anybody. Then people can get on with their lives."

"Who knows, maybe those two rogue leaders, Gandhi and Jesus, were right?a loving response changes the people who would beat the shit out of you, including yourself, of course. Their way, of the heart, makes everything bigger. Decency and goodness are subversively folded into the craziness, like caramel ribbons into ice cream. Otherwise, it?s about me, and my bile ducts, and how unique I am and how I?ve suffered. And that is what hell is like."

"Who knows how much of our stories are true?"

"Who was it who said that forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past?"

"Why couldn't Jesus command us to obsess over everything, to try to control and manipulate people, to try not to breathe at all, or to pay attention, stomp away to brood when people annoy us, and then eat a big bag of Hershey's Kisses in bed?"

"Why do we make it all seem like a crisis, over and over again? Why do we worry it all to death, like dogs with socks or chew-toys? 'Look at it this way...In a hundred years? - All new people."

"Wish there?d been a shortcut, but the wound."

"Will call him a she when the pee-pee is gone. Says Brave is to endure stares, jeers, prejudice. He won't."

"Without using the word, everyone started forgiving each other again. Just like that, from the no of all nothingness: you have a big tense mess and out of it comes some joy. It must be magic."

"Wonder takes our breath away, and makes room for new breath. That?s why they call it breathtaking."

"With THC in your system, you don't dream. And you need to. Otherwise it is like losing one of your senses. Dreams are part of your wholeness... when you're dreaming, you're not the one calling the shots. So it's a reprieve... the dream world had rules in it. You couldn't read a clock in your dreams. It would not give you the time. If the lights were on in a room, you could not turn them off in a dream... in indigenous tribes all over the world, the dream world was like church."

"Write as if your parents are dead."

"Writers show us the glades we'd missed, the trickling voices of streams, the eyes of a barn owl watching us. A writer like my father revealed a shape and movement amid it all, layers, meaning, perspective, joy, because he paid such careful attention, and paying attention is about the biggest redemption there is."

"Wow has a reverberation - wowowowowow - and this pulse can soften us, like the electrical massage an acupuncturist directs to your spine or cramped muscle, which feels like a staple gun, but good."

"Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don?t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you?re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act - truth is always subversive."

"Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. You don?t have to see where you?re going, you don?t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard."

"Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It?s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can?t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship."

"Writer?s block is going to happen to you. You will read what little you?ve written lately and see with absolute clarity that it is total dog shit."

"Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up."

"Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored."

"Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong."

"Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. that thing you had to force yourself to do--the actual act of writing--turns out to be the best part. it's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony."

"Writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little."

"Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right."

"Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein."

"Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly."

"Writing like this is a little like milking a cow: the milk is so rich and delicious, and the cow is so glad you did it."

"Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on. Now, if you ask me, what?s going on is that we?re all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another."

"Yet, I get to tell my truth. I get to seek meaning and realization. I get to live fully, wildly, imperfectly. That's why I'm alive. And all I actually have to offer as a writer, is my version of life. Every single thing that has happened to me is mine. As I've said a hundred times, if people wanted me to write more warmly about them, they should have behaved better."

"You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart--your stories, visions, memories, songs: your truth, your version of things, in your voice. That is really all you have to offer us, and it's why you were born."

"Yet union with a partner?someone with whom to wake, whom you love, and talk with on and off all day, and sit with at dinner, and watch TV and movies with, and read together in bed with, and do hard tasks with, and are loved by. That sounds really lovely."

"You are going to love some of your characters, because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason. But no matter what, you are probably going to have to let bad things happen to some of the characters you love or you won't have much of a story. Bad things happen to good characters, because our actions have consequences, and we do not all behave perfectly all the time."

"You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be."

"You begin to string words together like beads to tell a story. You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started."

"you begin to notice all the props surrounding these people, and you begin to understand how props define us and comfort us, and show us what we value and what we need, and who we think we are."

"You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you?re dirty and rattled. Who knew?"

"You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town"

"You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist. You can make the work a chore, or you can have a good time. You can do it the way you used to clear the dinner dishes when you were thirteen, or you can do it as a Japanese person would perform a tea ceremony, with a level of concentration and care in which you can lose yourself, and so in which you can find yourself."

"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."

"You can tell if people are following Jesus, because they are feeding the poor, sharing their wealth, and trying to get everyone medical insurance."

"You can't find your true voice and peer behind the door and report honestly and clearly to us if your parents are reading over your shoulder. They are probably the ones who told you not to open that door in the first place. You can tell if you they're there because a small voice will say, 'Oh, whoops, don't say that, that's a secret,' or 'That's a bad work,' or 'Don't tell anyone you jack off. They'll all start doing it.' So you have to breathe or pray or do therapy to send them away. Write as if your parents are dead."

"You celebrate what works and you take tender care of what doesn?t, with lotion, polish, and kindness."