Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether you’re going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.
A good marriage is where both people feel like they're getting the better end of the deal.
Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.
I liked those ladies! They were helpers, and they danced.? These are the words I want on my gravestone: that I was a helper, and that I danced.
Forgiveness is having given up all hope of having had a better past.
Here are the two best prayers I know: ‘Help me, help me, help me’ and ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic – jealousy especially so – but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.
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.
Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don’t be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.
I suspect that he was a child who thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious conversations with grown-ups, who as a young person, like me, accepted being alone quite a lot. I think that this sort of person often becomes either a writer or a career criminal.
To participate requires self-discipline and trust and courage, because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, as my friend Dale puts it, How alive am I willing to be?
Maybe it is because music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, the breath. We’re walking temples of noise, and when you add the tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn’t get to any other way.
To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass – seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one.
One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness.
One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, “It’s not like you don’t have a choice, because you do – you can either type or kill yourself.
Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you to soften, can wake you up.
Believing in George Bush was so ludicrous that believing in God almost seems rational.