Robin Black Quotes & Sayings

Leaning in, he kisses her on the cheek. Like an old acquaintance, she thinks. As though there had never been any passion, nor love, nor rage, nor anything much, just some traces of innocuous familiarity between them. Live long enough, it seems, and every fire can burn itself out. — Robin Black

My creativity isn't rooted in confidence. It grows from many things, no doubt, but chief among them is a deep, rebellious, and indeed almost hostile stance toward complacency- about anything. It feels like the enemy. And certainty? It closes doors. Ends discussions. Shuts other people out. — Robin Black

It was 911 calling me. If you can believe it. Them calling me. — Robin Black

Rejection is part of the game. Or rather, rejection is part of the profession. A profession which at times can feel like a game. — Robin Black

My mother's death ... seemed so much the focal point of all personal history in our lives, it was as though time began for us when it stopped for her. Maybe this is what happens to everyone - not necessarily sudden deaths , but certain events that create distinct before and after lines, walls really, requiring a great effort to climb, discouraging doing so. — Robin Black

The notion of a country cottage settled in her thoughts as a watercolor, red bricks, climbing roses, the house the most intelligent of the three little pigs built, but with some age on it now; and the place they found in western Massachusetts wasn't far off, solid enough to withstand huffs and puffs, small enough to feel manageable, large enough to hold visiting grandchildren, old enough to inspire optimism about what might, improbably, endure. — Robin Black

By forty, is there anyone who hasn't had to recognize that happiness, as understood by youth, is illusory? That the best one can hope for is an absence of too many tragedies and that the road through the inevitable grief be, if not smooth, then steady? — Robin Black

Thought: maybe this is what a mother feels like at times. When she can't help one of her children. When she has to just stand by and watch her daughter strike out on the softball field, watch her son fail at math despite whatever effort he may put in. This ache. This defining double bind of roaring, passionate protectiveness and its equal, weighty, leaden uselessness. And even the impatience with it all; and then the guilt about feeling impatient, about finding it a bit oppressive despite the immeasurable love. Maybe this is what mothering sometimes feels like, I thought. — Robin Black

I don't think about Terry every day, anymore. And sometimes I'm stunned by that fact. It isn't only the discomfort of disloyalty I feel, it's the fact of utter disappearance after death. The idea that as loved as we may be, we may also be forgotten. If only for a day here and there. — Robin Black

Now and then the universe just insists on changing your life in ways that you didn't ask it to. — Robin Black

You cannot write the pages you love without writing the pages you hate. Nothing that you write is pointless, useless, or unnecessary. The product requires the process. The good days may be more enjoyable, but the tough ones are the ones they're built upon. — Robin Black

It's unexpectedly painful to have become a pronoun. — Robin Black

That's what happens when one of you dies. The clock stops. The story ends. You can make some sense of it all. Begin to see patterns. Begin to understand. Maybe you can only begin to understand. Maybe the patterns are only the ones that you impose. But the thing takes on a different shape. It takes on a shape. — Robin Black

How funny it was. The very thing that had broken her heart, now no longer wanted. A trick of time. — Robin Black

It is autumn, mid-October, and the greens of our first encounter with this land have dressed up in fancy costume, orange, scarlet, yellow, to welcome us. It is almost too much to take in, all the beauty. — Robin Black

Do whatever you have to do, avoid whatever you need to avoid, protect yourself however you need to protect yourself in order to stay on course, write, send the work out, write more, send out more work. Because as wonderful as the rest of it may be, conferences, twitter, writing groups, and so on, if they are more than you can handle, that's okay. But if you stop writing and stop sending your work into the world, that is not okay. That is giving up. — Robin Black

This is where they failed, all those years back, he believes. In taking care of one another when tragedy struck. It broke them, broke them all. — Robin Black

The only thing you are allowed to take from an affair is wisdom. You can't say you are glad you did it or had moments of joy, but you can say that you learned a lot from your mistakes. — Robin Black

Make your skin as thick as you are able to, for your career. Keep it as thin as you can tolerate, for your art. — Robin Black

I spent so much time thinking about regret. Regret and its accompanying conviction that there is a perfect, placid life, one's own alternate existence, pristine and simple, existing in a neighboring reality in which certain turns in the road were never set upon. And it isn't true. Any of it. I knew that. I had learned it. But it is an irresistible fantasy, if only because it implies we have some control over our fates. — Robin Black

There are often two conversations going on in a marriage. The one that you're having and the one you're not. — Robin Black

Life. It begins and begins and begins. An infinite number of times. It is all beginnings until the end comes. Sometimes we know it and sometimes we do not, but, at every moment, life begins again. — Robin Black

just graduated from Tufts - Laine — Robin Black

There were some kids at Tufts who had been in the army, but they stayed to themselves. I'm pretty sure we must have seemed like babies to them. — Robin Black

I had confessed fully-with all the misguided passion of one who believes that she is cleansing herself and forgets that she may be staining the listener. — Robin Black

To what exactly had I felt entitled with Bill? There is an answer: Joy. Not happiness, which by that time seemed a fantasy one had to agree to give up in order to keep from going mad. By forty, is there anyone who hasn't had to recognize that happiness, as understood by youth, is illusory? That the best one can hope for is an absence of too many tragedies and that the road through the inevitable grief be, if not smooth, then steady? Daily life was a pale gray thing, it seemed, and to expect otherwise was to be a fool - at best. — Robin Black

All of it conspiring to carry them through those first few minutes and through the front door of the house with a lightness that doesn't allow for anything as potentially heavy as an acknowledged fresh start. — Robin Black

Sometimes life demands things of you, that just the fact of being alive means for allowing for possibilites that may be far from what you'd planned or even hoped. — Robin Black

...the thought of *never again* felt like death. — Robin Black

What part of life isn't peculiar? Seriously? At what point, really, do you stop and say, well, THIS is really strange? THIS part. Not THAT part. But THIS part. — Robin Black

There are moments in a creative life when you understand why you do it. Those moments might last a few seconds or maybe, for some people, years. But whatever the actual time that passes, they still feel like a single moment. Fragile in the way a moment is, liable to be shattered by a breath, set apart from all the other passing time, distinct.
But then it changes. And what seemed unimaginably exhilarating gets bogged down, even when a project is going well. It is a gradual, inevitable sobering during which your right to be passive diminishes. What the ether has given you, now in fact belongs to you. And then it is work. Then it is hard. — Robin Black

Diversity matters. Not only in what we look like, or what religion we practice, or in whom we love, but also in how we live our lives, including the order in which we go about things, the seasons in which we are able to create art. Those who are engaged in the arts should be the last to send any other message, because when artists endorse the traditional order of a society, it suggests that they have forgotten their own true role within it. — Robin Black