I’m riding beside my best friend, and I tell him, in the same offhand tone my mother had used, That’s my grandfather’s funeral, and he looks at me as if I’m insane.
Perhaps everyone has a story that could break your heart...
I became an electrician after high school. But I always had this thing in me to write. But it was always a little shameful. To say you were a poet was saying you were kind of crazy, and I carried that around for a long time. I still kind of carry that. And I think it might be true, actually.
On a good day I write, all day.
We got him to talk to a psych doctor once, the doctor asked if he heard things other people don’t. Sure, Paul answered, I hear birds in the morning when everyone’s sleeping, I hear trees rustling when no one’s around.
Perhaps it is our fear, that in the silence between stories, in the moment of falling, the fear that we will never find the one story which will save us, and so we lunge for another, and we feel safe again, if only for as long as we are telling it.
Memoir is actually the most egoless genre, even though it might seem ostensibly so much ego-driven. In order for it to succeed, you have to dissolve the self into these larger universal truths, and explore these deeper mysteries. If it’s purely autobiographical and ego-driven, it’s going to fail.
Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness.
If you’re going to write about someone’s life, you don’t just use them for wallpaper. You have to honor and respect that life.
That soldiers do terrible things during wartime should not surprise us.
Everything we do, I’d imagine, influences everything we will do.
When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family.
Certain stories we carry with us, events in our life, they define who we are. It’s not a matter of getting over anything; we have to make the best of it.
Read as much as you can. Write only when you feel the inner need to do so. And don’t ever rush into print.
Trinity Park lies directly across from the library, Trinity Church rising like a midieval thought amidst the glass and steel towers.
Alcohol is the river we sit on the banks of, contemplating. Sometimes we watch ourselves float past, sometimes we watch ourselves sink.
Some part of me knew he would show up, that if I stood in one place long enough he would find me, like you’re taught to do when you’re lost. But they never taught us what to do if both of you are lost, and you both end up in the same place, waiting.
There are many ways to drown, only the most obvious wave their arms as they’re going under.