Dani Shapiro Quotes & Sayings

I was doing a lot of yoga and learning to meditate, and I found that extremely helpful, and still do and hopefully always will. — Dani Shapiro

When I lived in the city, I had learned to close my door against a lot of the noise, but when I open my door here, I'm not opening into the possibility that I'm going to run into somebody or be faced with a hundred choices about what I'm going to do, or which cafe I'm going to go to, or which way to distract myself. — Dani Shapiro

I love living in the country, so much so that I'm even surprised by it. I have met lots of interesting people - the community was really welcoming, and I now probably have a more interesting social life than I did in the city. — Dani Shapiro

I needed to slow down and quiet down deeply into a lot of these questions, yet at the same time what I was looking for, and continue to, is a way to have this exist within a regular, normal, modern life. — Dani Shapiro

I am devoted to my husband and son. I am devoted to the practices and rituals that imbue our lives with a sense of meaning and purpose, that help me to live my days in the most emotionally and intellectually productive manner. I am devoted to the idea of devotion itself. — Dani Shapiro

After my family leaves in the morning, I'll make my first coffee of the day and then I head upstairs to go to work. At least, that's my plan. I'm not going to check email. I'm not going on Facebook, or sneaking a glimpse at my Instagram feed. No. I'm not going to down that road. But with multiple devices, by the time I get upstairs [to my study] I may well have heard my iPhone ding and - it's Pavlovian. — Dani Shapiro

The more we have at stake, the harder it is to make the leap into writing. The more we think about who's going to read it, what they're going to think, how many copies will be printed, whether this magazine or that magazine will accept it for publication, the further away we are from accomplishing anything alive on the page. — Dani Shapiro

I had spent my childhood and the better part of my early adulthood trying to understand my mother. She had been an extraordinarily difficult person, spiteful and full of rage, with a temper that could flare, seemingly out of nowhere, scorching everything and everyone who got in its way. [pp. 40-41] — Dani Shapiro

With tremendous clarity and wisdom, Daniel Tomasulo has crafted a memoir at once heartbreaking and uplifting. Layers of time and memory - childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle age - are so beautifully revealed here, a trenchant reminder that our pasts are alive inside of us. There are psychologists who can write, and writers who can psychologize, but rarely have the two met on the page with such moving, profound results. — Dani Shapiro

I couldn't write. I grew tense. I was strangled by my own ego, by my petty desire for what I perceived to be the literary brass ring. I was missing the point, of course. The reward is in the doing. — Dani Shapiro

My journals were a clearing house - a garbage can. Once I was writing seriously, I understood that this was the stuff that didn't belong in my work. — Dani Shapiro

If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art. — Dani Shapiro

Devotion, as it relates to the title of my memoir, means fidelity - as in fidelity to a person or a practice. I think it's certainly possible to feel devotion without having faith, at least in the religious sense of the word. — Dani Shapiro

There's a danger in romanticizing what it means to be a writer. Because what it really means is hard, hard work. It means tearing your hair out. Feeling like your head is about to explode. — Dani Shapiro

Everything changes. The more I try to hold on to the moment, the more it slips through my fingers. — Dani Shapiro

There's something about urban life - you walk out your door, and you're in a steady of stream of life happening around you, and it's very easy to get caught up in that stream and simply kind of keep on moving. — Dani Shapiro

I started realising that the themes running through all of my novels were really haunting and obsessing me about my own life. — Dani Shapiro

Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write — Dani Shapiro

I believe that there is something connecting us ... Something that was here before we got here and will still be here after we're gone. I've begun to believe that all of our consciousnesses are bound up in that greater consciousness.
...
An animating presence ... [pp. 205-206] — Dani Shapiro

But today, something begins to shift. I see that there might be some way I can take the raw material of my life and transform it into something that has order and structure. I can make sense of what, until now, has been senseless. — Dani Shapiro

My desk is covered with talismans: pieces of rose quartz, wishing stones from a favorite beach. — Dani Shapiro

Michael Lowenthal has written a big-hearted and wise book about familial love in all its richness and complexity. — Dani Shapiro

The only graceful thing to do is recognize and embrace what is actually happening, rather than fight against it. — Dani Shapiro

Our teachers are everywhere. Our teachers are right in front of us, and take so many forms. All we need to do is to open our eyes, to be open to and aware of the possibilities. Otherwise, we walk sightless among miracles. — Dani Shapiro

Think of a ballet dancer at the barre. Plie, eleve, battement tendu. She is practicing, because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art. — Dani Shapiro

Let me tell you something about hypochondria: It's a pernicious, undermining little demon. It won't kill you, but it will sap the color from your life so that in the loveliest moments, the moments of grace, you are hit with that whisper in your ear that takes it all away. I'm sick, I'm dying - I just don't know it yet. — Dani Shapiro

It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive. — Dani Shapiro

Act as if you're a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don't wait for anybody to tell you it's okay. — Dani Shapiro

Confidence is highly overrated when it comes to creating literature. A writer who is overly confident will not engage in the struggle to get it exactly right on the page - but rather, will assume that she's getting it right without the struggle. — Dani Shapiro

In order to write a memoir, I've sat still inside the swirling vortex of my own complicated history like a piece of old driftwood, battered by the sea. I've waited - sometimes patiently, sometimes in despair - for the story under pressure of concealment to reveal itself to me. I've been doing this work long enough to know that our feelings - that vast range of fear, joy, grief, sorrow, rage, you name it - are incoherent in the immediacy of the moment. It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters — Dani Shapiro

When I think of the wisest people I know, they share one defining trait: curiosity. They turn away from the minutiae of their lives-and focus on the world around them. They are motivated by the desire to explore the unfamiliar. They are drawn toward what they don't understand. — Dani Shapiro

It wasn't getting easier because it isn't supposed to get easier. Midlife was a bitch, and my educated guess was that the climb only got steeper from here. Carl Jung put it perfectly: "Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life," he wrote. "Worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will by evening have become a lie."
... I was writing a new program for the afternoon of life. The scales tipped away from suffering and toward openheartedness and love. [p. 182] — Dani Shapiro

What was going on inside of me became louder because everything around me became quieter. — Dani Shapiro

Every once in a while, the darkness was too much. It had been quite some time since I had woken up in the middle of the night and into an abyss of terror. But here I was ... I couldn't soothe myself ... But if that person had been accessible to me, I wouldn't have been in the state I was in to begin with. [pp. 195-196] — Dani Shapiro

I never feel so alive as when I'm writing and the work is going well. — Dani Shapiro

It would be many years before I began to understand that all of life is practice: writing, driving, hiking, brushing teeth, packing lunch boxes, making beds, cooking dinner, making love, walking dogs, even sleeping. We are always practicing. Only practicing. — Dani Shapiro

Gone was the reflexive need to see the worst in things. Before the tumors took her life, they gave her a few moments of grace. — Dani Shapiro

I was longing for the moment I was in, even as I was in it. — Dani Shapiro

I do strongly identify with being Jewish. I was raised Orthodox and had a childhood complicated by the fact that my father was deeply religious and my mother was not. — Dani Shapiro

I've become convinced that our lives are shaped less by the mistakes we make than when we make them. There is less elasticity now. Less time to bounce back. And so I heed the urgent whisper and move with greater and greater deliberation. — Dani Shapiro

I'm an urban person who loves living in the country. — Dani Shapiro

I found myself doing so much public speaking, more and more and bigger and bigger. — Dani Shapiro

When it comes to the personal essays I write, I just convince myself that no one will ever read them. — Dani Shapiro

We can't protect ourselves from pain and heartache. — Dani Shapiro

What she doesn't realize is that I have survived for her as well -- and only now am I beginning to survive for myself. — Dani Shapiro

In the country, I stopped being a person who, in the words of Sylvia Boorstein, startles easily. I grew calmer, but beneath that calm was a deep well of loneliness I hadn't known was there ... Anxiety was my fuel. When I stopped, it was all waiting for me: fear, anger, grief, despair, and that terrible, terrible loneliness. What was it about? I was hardly alone. I loved my husband and son. I had great friends, colleagues, students. In the quiet, in the extra hours, I was forced to ask the question, and to listen carefully to the answer: I was lonely for myself. [p. 123] — Dani Shapiro

As a writer we are our own instruments; we need to protect our instrument, because no one will protect it if we don't. — Dani Shapiro

It's essential to have sacred time for writing. All successful authors have some daily commitment to keep on-track and moving forward. — Dani Shapiro

The writer's life requires courage, patience, empathy, openness. It requires the ability to be alone with oneself. Gentle with oneself. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks. — Dani Shapiro

Rather than feeling vindicated, I felt guilty. It seemed cruel, and all my fault, somehow. My relationship with my mother had always brought into question any sense I had of myself as a good and decent person. [p. 128] — Dani Shapiro

Logic and faith don't occupy the same side. — Dani Shapiro

When I was starting out there was no Internet, there wasn't this sense that you could be connected to other writers around the world. And that created a kind of innocence, or parochial quality, even in NYC. — Dani Shapiro

I never troll for material. It simply presents itself, and is always unmistakable. This is why I want to roll my eyes when people interrupt themselves in the middle of some story they're telling me to say, "You know you can't write about this." — Dani Shapiro

I used to act in television commercials when I was a kid and a young adult. — Dani Shapiro

When I was growing up, I had no idea that I could possibly become a writer. I wrote endlessly in journals - a practice I maintained for a long time, well into the writing life I had no idea I could ever have. — Dani Shapiro

I did want to feel like life's all of one piece. — Dani Shapiro

I've always felt like my nose is pressed to glass. I always feel a little bit like an outsider. — Dani Shapiro

I try to remember that the job - as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy - of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it. — Dani Shapiro

I'll have my students try to follow their minds during the course of a day, just to see the way their minds work, the way our minds hop from thing to thing to thing. The Internet mirrors that to such a degree you can actually see it. Show me your search history and I'll show you who you are. — Dani Shapiro

The truth is in the present moment. — Dani Shapiro

Oh, child! Somewhere inside you, your future has already unfurled like one of those coiled-up party streamers, once shiny, shaken loose, floating gracefully for a brief moment, now trampled underfoot after the party is over. The future you're capable of imagining is already a thing of the past. Who did you think you would grow up to become? You could never have dreamt yourself up. Sit down. Let me tell you everything that's happened. You can stop running now. You are alive in the woman who watches you as you vanish. — Dani Shapiro

It wasn't so much that I was in search of answers. In fact, I was wary of the whole idea of answers. I wanted to climb all the way inside of the questions and see what was there. — Dani Shapiro

Our minds simply don't function in some sort of narrative chronology. I think that one of the great gifts of writing fiction is being able to think about that. — Dani Shapiro

It's not gender-specific, but I do think it's women who tend to start having that sort of little whispering voice of "I want more here" and "I want more for my family." — Dani Shapiro

My parents made the decision never to focus on my looks, and I had no sense of myself as beautiful. — Dani Shapiro

I've certainly faced some raw, real pain in my life. I lost my father to a car accident when I was young. My mother died ten years ago. My son was very sick as an infant. Eventually, I have attempted to transform this pain into art, to make meaning out of it. — Dani Shapiro

Apparently, using two spaces after a period has become anachronistic. But tell that to my right thumb. - — Dani Shapiro

I could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working. — Dani Shapiro

As a fiction writer, that's been a preoccupation of mine: Can you really just close the door and leave the past back there behind you, or is the door going to blow open at some point? — Dani Shapiro

We secretly believe that if only we achieve some elusive goal - fitting into a pair of skinny jeans, or redoing our kitchen or getting that promotion - that it will make us happy. But the pain of our insecurity is hidden in all that racing around. — Dani Shapiro

I do whatever is necessary in order to maintain the equanimity we all need to withstand the disappointment and rejection that are the lot of every writer, no matter where we are in our careers. — Dani Shapiro

Our pain hides beneath these fluttering, random thoughts that run through our heads in an endless loop. But there's so much freedom in getting to know what's under there, the bedrock. — Dani Shapiro

...it feels as if mountain pose is the most challenging of all yoga poses. To be still. To be grounded. To claim one's place in the world. — Dani Shapiro

I often envy my friends who are visual artists. Visual artists have other things to work with. Other media. I envy my sculptor friends: they have hunks of matter. Marble. Wood. It's physical, which I find very appealing. What we have is nothing, is just glaringly blank. — Dani Shapiro

The fact is that most husbands, regardless of religion - it's an old-fashioned gender divide where the husband wants to stay home and the wife is the one who drags herself and her children to whatever spiritual center they're going to. — Dani Shapiro

The mind is a monkey, hopping around from thought to thought, image to image. Rarely do more than a few seconds go by in which the mind can remain single-pointed, empty. — Dani Shapiro

The Internet and all its lures are much, much harder than anything I've ever encountered. If you're writing on a computer, the very instrument you're writing on is already tainted by the world out there in all its permutations. — Dani Shapiro

Moving to the country has been incredibly good for my work, for my sense of perspective. — Dani Shapiro

Sometimes, I'm driving along in my car, and a song from my high-school years comes on the radio: Springsteen's 'Thunder Road.' Just the opening few chords make me want to roll down the window and let the wind blow back my hair. — Dani Shapiro

Open your hearts. Deep inside ourselves, we are all one and the same. — Dani Shapiro

I've never heard a writer feel that way about a device with a screen. Oh sure, they're functional, practical. We would be lost without them. But just as we need to feel our feet on the earth, smell and taste the world around us, the pen scratching against the page, sensory and slow, is the difference between looking at a high-definition picture of a flower and holding that very same flower in your palm, feeling the brush of its petals, the color of its stamen rubbing off on your fingers. — Dani Shapiro

I'm most connected to myself when I'm alone in a room, moving my hand across a page. That's when I feel most like me. — Dani Shapiro

There's a great expression in Twelve Step programs: Act as if. Act as if you're a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don't wait for anybody to tell you it's okay. Take that shimmer and show us our humanity. That's your job. — Dani Shapiro

I can tell you that the writing of a book, no matter how deeply, profoundly personal-if it is literature, if you have attended to the formidable task of illumination the human heart in conflict with itself-will do the opposite of expose you. It will connect you. With others. With the world around you. With yourself. — Dani Shapiro

And these years later, when I think of that essay, what I remember most is not the moment I saw my work in New Yorker font, not when I saw the illustration of my father, not the congratulatory phone calls and notes that followed, but that predawn morning in my bedroom, at my desk, the lights of cars below on Broadway, my computer screen glowing in the dark. — Dani Shapiro

We are tyrannized by our options. — Dani Shapiro

There are books that a writer undertakes because she wants to go on a journey, and there are journeys a writer undertakes because she wants to write a book. — Dani Shapiro

Traces that live within us often lead us to our stories — Dani Shapiro

If we grew up with nothing, we're complicated with that. That's the thing I keep hearing from people. — Dani Shapiro

Success is so fleeting; even if you get a good book deal, or your book is a huge success, there's always the fear: 'What about the next one?' — Dani Shapiro

It's easier in an urban world to cast the blame outward. So I've learned a lot about my own process in that way. — Dani Shapiro

The writing life requires courage, patience, persistence, empathy, openness, and the ability to deal with rejection. It requires the willingness to be alone with oneself. To be gentle with oneself. To look at the world without blinders on. To observe and withstand what one sees. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks. To be willing to fail - not just once, but again and again, over the course of a lifetime. — Dani Shapiro

I was raised in an observant Jewish household, so for me, Hebrew prayers - the sounds, the sunlight streaming in from the stained-glass windows of a synagogue - bring my father back to me as surely as if he were sitting next to me, my head pressed against his shoulder. — Dani Shapiro

With each book you write you have to learn how to write that book - so every time, you have to start all over again. — Dani Shapiro

According to ayurveda, we become what we surround ourselves with. And so it stands to reason that we have to be discerning about what we surround ourselves with. Steve Cope [p. 85] — Dani Shapiro

I live with my family on the top of a hill in the country, and during the days, my house is quiet, save for the occasional excitement of the FedEx truck heading up the driveway. I write. — Dani Shapiro

Courage is more important than confidence — Dani Shapiro

I don't think it's possible to separate out the strands of a writer's history, circumstances, life events, and that writer's themes. — Dani Shapiro

When I started meditating, even doing yoga, I felt like it was hard to allow myself to develop any other kind of practice [outside of Judaism], like I was somehow being untrue to my heritage, and that was something I had to get over and was probably the greatest revelation to me. — Dani Shapiro

Sometimes when I'm at my desk, I'll realize that I have contorted myself completely, and I haven't moved for hours, and that my legs have fallen asleep. I am elsewhere, not in my body, not in the room, not in my house. — Dani Shapiro