Great Throughts Treasury

"I think we're all pretty crazy on this bus. I'm not sure I know anyone who's got all the dots on his or her dice."

"I think that something similar happens with our psychic muscles. They cramp around our wounds ? the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both ? to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never have a chance to heal. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases we don't even know that the wounds and the cramping are there, but both limit us. They keep us moving and writing in tight, worried ways. They keep us standing back or backing away from life, keep us from experiencing life in a naked and immediate way."

"I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish."

"I tried to cooperate with grace, which is to say, I did not turn on the TV."

"I took notes on the people around me, in my town, in my family, in my memory. I took notes on my own state of mind, my grandiosity, the low self-esteem. I wrote down the funny stuff I overheard. I learned to be like a ship's rat, veined ears trembling, and I learned to scribble it all down."

"I told myself that historically when people do too well too quickly, they are a Greek tragedy waiting to happen."

"I understood that the man I was calling for could never ever come back. Because I understood that the man that I was calling for was dead."

"I want people who write to crash or dive below the surface, where life is so cold and confusing and hard to see. Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth."

"I try to write the books I would love to come upon, that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness?and that can make me laugh. When I am reading a book like this, I feel rich and profoundly relieved to be in the presence of someone who will share the truth with me, and throw the lights on a little, and I try to write these kinds of books. Books, for me, are medicine."

"I want to hear someone remind me that if I want to have loving feelings, I need to do loving things. I want someone to make me laugh about our shared humanity and cuckooness; I want someone to remind me that laughter is carbonated holiness."

"I used to think that paired opposites were a given, that love was the opposite of hate, right the opposite of wrong. But now I think we sometimes buy into these concepts because it is so much easier to embrace absolutes than to suffer reality. I don't think anything is the opposite of love. Reality is unforgivingly complex."

"I was frozen like in a dream when your feet weigh fifty pounds each and the danger is almost upon you."

"I was learning the secrets of life: that you could become the woman you?d dared to dream of being, but to do so you were going to have to fall in love with your own crazy, ruined self."

"I want to want this softening, this surrender, this happiness. Can I get a partial credit for that? The problem is, I love to be, and so often am, right. It?s mood-altering, and it covers up a multitude of sins? I know justice and believing that you?re right depend on cold theological and legal arguments where frequently there is no oxygen, but honestly I don?t mind this. I learned to live in thin air as a small child."

"I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and save the world. You sent money to the Red Cross, you registered people to vote, you marched in rallies, stood in vigils, picked up litter."

"I was reminded of the Four Immutable Laws of the Spirit: Whoever is present are the right people. Whenever it begins is the right time. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened. And when it's over, it's over."

"I was terrified of death by the time I was three or four, actively if not lucidly. I had frequent nightmares about snakes and scary neighbors. By the age of four or five, I was terrified by my thoughts. By the time I was five, the migraines began. I was so sensitive about myself and the world that I cried or shriveled up at the slightest hurt. People always told me, You've got to get a thicker skin, like now they might say, jovially, Let go and let God. Believe me, if I could, I would, and in the meantime I feel like stabbing you in the forehead. Teachers wrote on my report cards that I was too sensitive, excessively worried, as if this were an easily correctable condition, as if I were wearing too much of the violet toilet water little girls wore then."

"I watched him carefully. He was making art because he has to, and because he's brave enough to try and make contact, right there on the edge of madness, where he dreams."

"I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I'd remember that wonderful line of Blake's- that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love- and I would take a long deep breath and force these words out of my strangulated throat: Thank you."

"I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kind of things. Also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace's arrival. But no, it's clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in the silence, in the dark."

"I?m pretty sure that only by experiencing that ocean of sadness in a naked and immediate way do we come to be healed?which is to say, we come to experience life with a real sense of presence and spaciousness and peace."

"I?m probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac."

"If I were going to begin practicing the presence of God for the first time today, it would help to begin by admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little."

"If courage is not there, if the possibility of things getting better is not there, listen a little harder."

"If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you'll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in."

"If we can believe in the Gnostic gospel of Thomas, old Uncle Jesus said, If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don?t bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth can destroy you."

"If we stay where we are, where we?re stuck, where we?re comfortable and safe, we die there. We become like mushrooms, living in the dark, with poop up to our chins. If you want to know only what you already know, you?re dying."

"If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. 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."

"If you always dreamed of writing a novel or a memoir, and you used to love to write, and were pretty good at it, will it break your heart if it turns out you never got around to it? If you wake up one day at eighty, will you feel nonchalant that something always took precedence over a daily commitment to discovering your creative spirit? If not--if this very thought fills you with regret--then what are you waiting for?"

"If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there... When nothing new can get in, that's death."

"If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days--listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you've taken in, all that you've overheard, and you turn it into gold. (Or at least you try.)"

"If you haven't already, you will lose someone you can't live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and you never completely get over the loss of a deeply beloved person. But this is also good news. The person lives forever, in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up. And you come through, and you learn to dance with the banged-up heart."

"If you screwed up and said out loud that you thought something scary was happening, grown-ups would say, Oh, for Pete?s sake?what an imagination. This is the best way to gaslight children. It keeps them under control, because if the parent is a mess, the children are doomed. It?s best for the child to think he or she is the problem. Then there is toxic hope, which is better than no hope at all, that if the child can do better or need less, the parents will be fine."

"If you want to change the way you feel about people, you have to change the way you treat them."

"If you want to feel loving, I coached myself, do something loving. This is basic soul care."

"If you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses don?t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining."

"If you don?t believe in what you are saying, there is no point in your saying it. You might as well call it a day and go bowling."

"If you are mesmerized by televised stupidity, and don't get to hear or read stories about your world, you can be fooled into thinking that the world isn't miraculous--and it is."

"If you find that you start a number of stories or pieces that you don?t ever bother finishing, that you lose interest or faith in them along the way, it may be that there is nothing at their center about which you care passionately."

"If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package."

"If you don't believe in God, it may help to remember this great line of Geneen Roth's: that awareness is learning to keep yourself company. And then learn to be more compassionate company, as if you were somebody you are fond of and wish to encourage. I doubt that you would read a close friend's early efforts and, in his or her presence, roll your eyes and snicker. I doubt that you would pantomime sticking your finger down your throat. I think you might say something along the lines of, 'Good for you. We can work out some of the problems later, but for now, full steam ahead!"

"If you want to know how God feels about money, look at whom she gives it to."

"If you?re not enough before the gold medal, you won?t be enough with it."

"If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans."

"If you want to have loving feelings today, do loving things: Flirt with everyone, especially old people and yourself. Pick up some litter in your neighborhood, even though there will be more by Sunday. Get your work done, one inadequate sentence and paragraph at a time. Then go through your draft and take out all the lies and boring parts. Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe.....Those are the things I am going to do today."

"If your wife locks you out of the house, you don't have a problem with your door."

"I'll live as well, as deeply, as madly as I can--until I die."

"I'm all over the place, up and down, scattered, withdrawing, trying to find some elusive sense of serenity."

"I'm here to be me, which is taking a great deal longer than I had hoped."

"I'm pretty sure that it is only by experiencing that ocean of sadness in a naked and immediate way that we come to be healed--which is to say, that we come to experience life with a real sense of presence and spaciousness and peace."