To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.
As a writer, I have learned that each time I pick up my pencil I betray someone.
I grew up in a culture in which it was a sin for a woman to speak out.
There is an art to writing, and it is not always disclosure. The act itself can be beautiful, revelatory, and private.
Home is where we have a history.
When I write, I put one foot in front of the other. It’s an act of faith. I just follow my heart.
I will never be able to say what is in my heart because words fail us, because it is in our nature to protect, because there are times when what is public and what is private must be discerned.
The only thing I have done religiously in my life is keep a journal. I have hundreds of them, filled with feathers, flowers, photographs, and words – without locks, open on my shelves.
My family lives all around me. We see each other daily. It’s very, very complicated. I think that families hold us together and they split us apart.
I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create fabric in the world that often appears black and white. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change.
To hear something asks very little of us. To listen places our entire being on notice.
Perhaps the most radical act we can commit is to stay home.
The Japanese have a word – aware – which, in my understanding is, again, that full range – both the joy and the sorrow of our life. One does not exist without the other. And I really feel that.
I write as a witness to what I have seen.
I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white.
We’re animals, I think we forget that. I think there is an ancient archetypal memory that still exists within us. If we deny that, what is the cost? So I do think it’s what binds us as human beings.
We are taught not to trust our own experiences. Great Salt Lake teaches me experience is all we have.
The only book worth writing is the book that threatens to kill you.
Words empower us, move us beyond our suffering, and set us free.
I feel like we are at a time of great creativity if we choose to embrace it as such, if we choose to engage the will of our imaginations and imagine another way of being in the world.