As novelist Harry Crews once wrote, I’m the kind of person who—if he can’t have too much of something—doesn’t want any of it. In
I was only precocious mentally and lived in deadly fear of losing my virtue, not for moral reasons, but from the dread of being thought easy.
Who but a drunk, I wonder looking back, could sit on the porch alone and get in an argument?)
God has a dream for me? I say. I love that idea. It sounds like a Disney movie.I know, Margaret says. Her pale round face opens up. Everybody uses the phrase or . That has a neo-Nazi ring to it.I lik...
Finally, put it aside. Put it out of your head at least a week. You want it to set up like jello. And when you pick it back up, ask yourself, What haven’t I said? How might someone else involved have...
Faith is not a feeling, she says. It’s a set of actions. By taking the actions, you demonstrate more faith than somebody who actually has experienced the rewards of prayer and so feels hope. Fake it t...
Faith is a choice like any other. If you're picking a career or a husband - or deciding whether to have a baby - there are feelings and reasons pro and con out the wazoo. But thinking it through is -...
Dumb hope is what it hurts most to write, occupying the foolish schemes we pursued for decades, the blind alleys, the cliffs we stepped off.
Charm is from the Latin carmen: to sing. By charm, I mean sing well enough to hold the reader in thrall. Whatever people like about you in the world will manifest itself on the page. What drives them...
But whether you’re a memoirist or not, there’s a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past: it may continue to tug on you without your being aware of it. And lying about it can—for all but t...
As for the actual validity of the notion [of] an immovable self, ever-firm, you're there only by half, at best...You'll spend decades trying to will 'same self' into being. But you'll keep shape-shift...
Was behind in every conceivable way. So the old attack dog started howling through my head as I’d
Every time I picked up a pen, this grinding, unnamed fear overcame me—later identified as fear that my real self would spill out. One can’t mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit. What I ne...
Which ensures that life gets lived in miniature. In lieu of the large feelings—sorrow, fury, joy—I had their junior counterparts—anxiety, irritation, excitement. But
There was a diet center that sported a plywood cutout of a pink pig wearing a brick-red polka-dot dress. The bubble coming from the pig’s mouth held this phrase: A New Way To Lose Weight Without Starv...
The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.
Patti proposes that I pray to accept whatever reality I’m in, staying alert for practical solutions rather than issuing orders in prayer. It takes discipline to stop beseeching the heavens for wheelba...
None of us can ever know the value of our lives, or how our separate and silent scribbling may add to the amenity of the world, if only by how radically it changes us, one and by one.
In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.
If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it. Zora Neale Hurston