I love music and listen to music all the time, but I didn’t realize how much my body needed music. I needed it more than sex.
Believe in the integrity and value of the jagged path. We don’t always do the right thing on our way to rightness.
You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.
Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.
The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.
You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.
Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.
If someone is being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird, you don’t have to take it in. You don’t have to turn it into a big psychodrama about your worth. That behavior so often is not even about you. Don’t own other people’s crap.
That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding.
So on one hand, because the wilderness was familiar to me, it really helped me be brave. But it still was scary sometimes. I had to say to myself: “Chances are, you’re not going to be mauled by a bear.”
If there’s one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it’s that you can’t fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It’s a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees.
I write to find what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it right.
The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.
Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It’s the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It’s worthy of all the hullabaloo.
You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.
How wild it was, to let it be.
I’d finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.
I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything to me.
Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.
The most important thing for aspiring writers is for them to give themselves permission to be brave on the page, to write in the presence of fear, to go to those places that you think you can’t write – really that’s exactly what you need to write.