Pam Houston Quotes & Sayings

I love the Bahamas, and I used to go there all the time with my friend who passed away, Henry. And I love it there, especially that island [Grand Exuma], so I've been there a lot over the twenty years. — Pam Houston

I've always traveled. I'm a professor in a limited way. I teach one class two quarters out of four, so I get traveling done. — Pam Houston

People are supposed to accumulate, I thought, as they get older, but I seem to be sloughing off, like a person wrapped in a hundred layers of cellophane, tearing one layer off at a time, trying to get down to me. — Pam Houston

Movement helps keep me centered. I am a disaster, for instance, at sitting meditation, but I'm pretty decent at walking meditation. — Pam Houston

One thing I'm always thinking about myself is what am I willing to make up? And the answer is not much. — Pam Houston

I'm always out looking for weird, beautiful things. — Pam Houston

Cheryl Strayed is a courageous, gritty, and deceptively elegant writer. — Pam Houston

For me, the shaping of the story is more important than accuracy. — Pam Houston

When a book is in its final stages, I've just got to be home, looking at it seventeen hours a day, and that's fine. But all that initial creation of the early drafts, I'd just as soon write it on the road in any extreme place. That's sort of ideal. — Pam Houston

For a long time I thought the object of the game was identifying the question, love versus freedom, Mandela vs Buthelezi, leave or stay forever ghosted under a thick curtain of oil. Nora said, Maybe a choice isn't the right way to think of it, by which she might have meant, A question loses its power when there is only one answer, as in, yes to Bhutan and Barstow. Yes to chanterelles and portobellos. A temple. Yes. A mosque. Yes. The changeable heart of a child. — Pam Houston

I always think, when I'm in motion, writing seems like the most natural thing. — Pam Houston

Give me a labyrinth to walk and I can usually free my mind. — Pam Houston

The Universe has a plan to make sure we don't ever stop learning, not only in our minds, but also in our hearts. — Pam Houston

I write well on the road. I have the energy, I have the motivation to write. I'm happy when I'm on the road. — Pam Houston

Dogs change lives. Half Buddha, half Bozo, they keep us tethered to the earth, and teach us to fly. Our dogs are our sanity keepers. — Pam Houston

When I was a little kid, I used to walk miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of railroad tracks. — Pam Houston

It would have been so perfectly ironic if I had been killed by the dog, because I was petting a dog who was not used to being pet, because I think I'm some kind of dog whisperer, and I think I can make any dog love me. — Pam Houston

I guess I don't believe you can have it all. I don't believe any of us can. In fact, I believe the very expression having it all is not only a myth but also a symptom of how sick we are in our contemporary culture. Nobody gets to have it all ... You will have one thing or another depending on what choice you make. Or you will have both things in limited amounts, and that might turn out to be perfect, just exactly the life you want' (175). — Pam Houston

I write really well on the road. — Pam Houston

My parents were travelers. Every time my parents got ten dollars ahead they went somewhere. That's what they did. So I got the bug from them. — Pam Houston

Writers, it is said, all carry a chip of ice in their hearts — Pam Houston

When he says "Skins or blankets?" it will take you a moment to realized that he's asking which you want to sleep under. And in your hesitation he'll decide that he wants to see your skin wrapped in the big black moose hide. He carried it, he'll say, soaking wet and heavier than a dead man, across the tundra for two - was it hours or days or weeks? But the payoff, now, will be to see it fall across one of your white breasts. It's December, and your skin is never really warm, so you will pull the bulk of it around you and pose for him, pose for his camera, without having to narrate this moose's death. — Pam Houston

Sometimes no matter how well you prepare, no matter how conservative your decision making, no matter how few Y chromosomes are along on your trip, you can still find yourself in a mud slide or a hurricane without a dry piece of clothing to your name. But those of us who have given our time and usually our hearts to outdoorsmen over the years know that, for many of them, it's not really a wilderness trip unless, MacGyver-like, they have to make a fire out of a pair of shorts, a glow stick, and a ketchup bottle; it's not really an adventure until someone gets airlifted out. — Pam Houston

Do you write novels?" I said.
"Novels, Lord no," she said. "I can't even stay married. — Pam Houston

For the people of my country," Renato said, "water is everything: love, life, religion ... even God."
"It is like that for me too," I said. "In English we call that a metaphor."
"Of course," said Renato, "and water is the most abundant metaphor on earth. — Pam Houston

Traveling is my priority, because it drives the writing, so I teach around the travel, and sometimes the travel is the teaching. — Pam Houston

I'm not very interested in telling the facts. I have a lot of investment in telling the truth. — Pam Houston

I was in Mongolia, pretty extreme situations. We were sick with dysentery, we were sick with bronchitis. I had been bitten by a dog for the first time in my life and my whole hand was black, and there was no way to even think of getting a rabies shot without driving for five days, and then you wouldn't have wanted that needle in your skin anyway. And I had my period. Everything was wrong at one time. Like, I couldn't have been more uncomfortable. And I stayed up - it was too cold to sleep. — Pam Houston

Life gives us what we need when we need it; receiving what it gives us is a whole other thing. — Pam Houston

I wanted her to see that the only life worth living is a life full of love; that loss is always part of the equation; that love and loss conjoined are the best opportunity we get to live fully, to be our strongest, our most compassionate, our most graceful selves. — Pam Houston

Praise Roxane Gay for her big-hearted self-examining intelligence, for her inclusive and forgiving stance, for her courage and determination ... for saying out loud the things we were thinking, for guiding us back to ourselves and returning to us what was ours all along. — Pam Houston

I've been to a lot of school and read a lot of thick books, but at my very core there's a made-for-TV-movie mentality I don't think i will ever shake. — Pam Houston

There are three principles to remember if you are to teach a human being anything, and they are consistency, consistency, consistency.They are such fragile creatures to begin with, with poor eyes, poorer hearing, and no sense of smell left to speak of, it's no wonder they are made of fear. Some centuries ago they moved inside and with that move went nine-tenths of their intuition. It is almost unmerciful to make them live so long when they spend their lives in so much pain. — Pam Houston

If I die tonight it will be with every single thing unfinished (like, I suppose, any other night), and yet, what a gift to die on the verge of tears. I have spent my life trying to understand the way this rock and this ache go together, why a granite peak is more dramatic half dressed in clouds ... ,why sunlight under fog is better than the sum of its parts, why my best days and my worst days are always the same days, why (often) leaving seems like the only solution to the predicament of loving (each other) the world. — Pam Houston

I'm about going out in the world and noticing stuff, and going home and writing it down, and putting it next to other stuff I've noticed and seeing what happens. — Pam Houston

We are up in the attic doing a jigsaw puzzle, which may be the single fastest way one OCD person reveals herself to another. — Pam Houston

Sometimes I'm writing for magazines on assignment, but the university has to be patient with me. I mean, during the ten-week periods that I have a class, I'm there every Thursday night or whatever it is, but sometimes that's all I'm there, because I'm somewhere else the rest of the time. — Pam Houston

There was something about the prairie for me - it wasn't where I had come from, but when I moved there it just took me in and I knew I couldn't ever stop living under that big sky. — Pam Houston

Being in the presence of the "other" seems to show me who I am in a way that is really important to me. I feel radically more comfortable in Laos, say, than I do in Pennsylvania. — Pam Houston

It's September 21st, a day I love for the balance it carries with it. — Pam Houston

I will never regret not having children. What I regret is that I live in a world where in spite of everything, that decision is still not quite okay. — Pam Houston

If a situation requires swearing to God it is - by definition - extreme. — Pam Houston

The more important question, of course, was what the new Lucy would do, and even though I was pretty sure the old Lucy wouldn't be around much anymore, I was a little bit afraid the new Lucy hadn't yet shown up. — Pam Houston

His name was Zeke, short for Ezekiel. She asked him if he was religious, he said only about certain things. — Pam Houston

I always tell my students, about the biggest baddest things in life you must try to write small and light, save the big writing for the unexpected tiny thing that always makes or breaks a story. — Pam Houston

There's this great Ron Carlson story, "A Note on the Type," and it's about this guy who keeps escaping from prison. He's really good at escaping, but he gets caught all the time, because he can't stop writing his name on underpasses where he's running from the law. And there's this whole beautiful paragraph about how to run is to write. And, you know, it's obviously about the writer's life. — Pam Houston

I've always said the toughest thing about learning to feel your feelings is that then you have to feel your feelings ... — Pam Houston

Stillness is a harder concept for me than ecstasy, but I can imagine it best when I am fully present and paying strict attention to a place I am moving through. — Pam Houston

Every day at about four o'clock, I would go up to a farmhouse - or whatever kind of house was around - and knock on the door and say, "Hi, I'm biking across Canada, and I'm wondering if I could pitch my tent on your land." And sometimes people slammed the door in my face, but the vast majority of the time they said, "Of course," and then they said, "Come for dinner," and then they packed me food the next day and fed me breakfast and sometimes they got out the bottle of wine they'd been saving for a special occasion. — Pam Houston