Top 100 Dani Shapiro Quotes
#1. All there is to do, right at this very moment, is to breathe in, breathe out, and kiss the joy as it flies.
Dani Shapiro
#2. There is no end to the promotion. There is no end to the possibilities. You can continue to promote a book for years, literally.
Dani Shapiro
#3. As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.
Dani Shapiro
#4. I do whatever is necessary in order to maintain the equanimity we all need to withstand the disappointment and rejection that are the lot of every writer, no matter where we are in our careers.
Dani Shapiro
#6. I couldn't write. I grew tense. I was strangled by my own ego, by my petty desire for what I perceived to be the literary brass ring. I was missing the point, of course. The reward is in the doing.
Dani Shapiro
#7. We don't choose what's going to wake us up.
Dani Shapiro
#8. My journals were a clearing house - a garbage can. Once I was writing seriously, I understood that this was the stuff that didn't belong in my work.
Dani Shapiro
#9. It's easier in an urban world to cast the blame outward. So I've learned a lot about my own process in that way.
Dani Shapiro
#10. This sadness wasn't a huge part of me
I wasn't remotely depressed
but still, it was like a stone I carried in my pocket. I always knew it was there. [p. 179]
Dani Shapiro
#11. I'll have my students try to follow their minds during the course of a day, just to see the way their minds work, the way our minds hop from thing to thing to thing. The Internet mirrors that to such a degree you can actually see it. Show me your search history and I'll show you who you are.
Dani Shapiro
#12. But today, something begins to shift. I see that there might be some way I can take the raw material of my life and transform it into something that has order and structure. I can make sense of what, until now, has been senseless.
Dani Shapiro
#13. I had never really felt settled in Brooklyn. I think it had to do with growing up in New Jersey and being someone who her whole life wanted to live in the city, and the city meant Manhattan.
Dani Shapiro
#14. When I was starting out there was no Internet, there wasn't this sense that you could be connected to other writers around the world. And that created a kind of innocence, or parochial quality, even in NYC.
Dani Shapiro
#15. My desk is covered with talismans: pieces of rose quartz, wishing stones from a favorite beach.
Dani Shapiro
#16. Writers are outsiders. Even when we seem like insiders, we're outsiders. We have to be. Our noses pressed to the glass, we notice everything. We mull and interpret. We store away clues, details that may be useful to us later.
Dani Shapiro
#17. I believe that there is something connecting us ... Something that was here before we got here and will still be here after we're gone. I've begun to believe that all of our consciousnesses are bound up in that greater consciousness.
...
An animating presence ... [pp. 205-206]
Dani Shapiro
#18. According to ayurveda, we become what we surround ourselves with. And so it stands to reason that we have to be discerning about what we surround ourselves with. Steve Cope [p. 85]
Dani Shapiro
#19. I do strongly identify with being Jewish. I was raised Orthodox and had a childhood complicated by the fact that my father was deeply religious and my mother was not.
Dani Shapiro
#20. Rather than feeling vindicated, I felt guilty. It seemed cruel, and all my fault, somehow. My relationship with my mother had always brought into question any sense I had of myself as a good and decent person. [p. 128]
Dani Shapiro
#21. Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I'm not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.
Dani Shapiro
#22. It's essential to have sacred time for writing. All successful authors have some daily commitment to keep on-track and moving forward.
Dani Shapiro
#23. Act as if you're a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don't wait for anybody to tell you it's okay.
Dani Shapiro
#24. Michael Lowenthal has written a big-hearted and wise book about familial love in all its richness and complexity.
Dani Shapiro
#25. When it comes to the personal essays I write, I just convince myself that no one will ever read them.
Dani Shapiro
#26. The mind is a monkey, hopping around from thought to thought, image to image. Rarely do more than a few seconds go by in which the mind can remain single-pointed, empty.
Dani Shapiro
#27. Logic and faith don't occupy the same side.
Dani Shapiro
#28. With each book you write you have to learn how to write that book - so every time, you have to start all over again.
Dani Shapiro
#29. Our pain hides beneath these fluttering, random thoughts that run through our heads in an endless loop. But there's so much freedom in getting to know what's under there, the bedrock.
Dani Shapiro
#30. When I sit down with my notebook, when I start scribbling words across the page, I find out what I'm feeling.
Dani Shapiro
#31. Our teachers are everywhere. Our teachers are right in front of us, and take so many forms. All we need to do is to open our eyes, to be open to and aware of the possibilities. Otherwise, we walk sightless among miracles.
Dani Shapiro
#32. What she doesn't realize is that I have survived for her as well -- and only now am I beginning to survive for myself.
Dani Shapiro
#33. From spiritual connection springs kindness, connection, social activism, and love.
Dani Shapiro
#34. I had spent my childhood and the better part of my early adulthood trying to understand my mother. She had been an extraordinarily difficult person, spiteful and full of rage, with a temper that could flare, seemingly out of nowhere, scorching everything and everyone who got in its way. [pp. 40-41]
Dani Shapiro
#35. Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.
Dani Shapiro
#36. At some point each day (well, most days) I unroll my mat and practice for an hour. I sit in meditation for a while. This can be five minutes or twenty minutes, but the daily practice - simply showing up for it - is centering.
Dani Shapiro
#37. Those memories that are engraved within me become teaching tools, ways of connecting with others, of creating an empathic bridge, of reaching out a hand and saying, I've been there, too.
Dani Shapiro
#38. Gone was the reflexive need to see the worst in things. Before the tumors took her life, they gave her a few moments of grace.
Dani Shapiro
#39. In a creative journey, it is essential, no matter how far one runs, to examine that which is closest to home.
Dani Shapiro
#41. Our pain is a part of who we authentically are.
Dani Shapiro
#42. I've certainly faced some raw, real pain in my life. I lost my father to a car accident when I was young. My mother died ten years ago. My son was very sick as an infant. Eventually, I have attempted to transform this pain into art, to make meaning out of it.
Dani Shapiro
#43. The only graceful thing to do is recognize and embrace what is actually happening, rather than fight against it.
Dani Shapiro
#44. I could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working.
Dani Shapiro
#45. I'm most connected to myself when I'm alone in a room, moving my hand across a page. That's when I feel most like me.
Dani Shapiro
#46. There are books that a writer undertakes because she wants to go on a journey, and there are journeys a writer undertakes because she wants to write a book.
Dani Shapiro
#47. To forget oneself-to lose oneself in the music, in the moment- that kind of absorption seems to be at the heart of every creative endeavor.
Dani Shapiro
#48. I've become convinced that our lives are shaped less by the mistakes we make than when we make them. There is less elasticity now. Less time to bounce back. And so I heed the urgent whisper and move with greater and greater deliberation.
Dani Shapiro
#49. I knew I wanted to be a writer before I knew that being a writer was possible.
Dani Shapiro
#50. I believe that we don't choose our stories," she began, leaning forward. "Our stories choose us." She paused and took a sip of water. Her hand, I noticed was steady.. "And if we don't tell them, then we are somehow diminished.
Dani Shapiro
#51. I needed to slow down and quiet down deeply into a lot of these questions, yet at the same time what I was looking for, and continue to, is a way to have this exist within a regular, normal, modern life.
Dani Shapiro
#52. If we are artists- hell, whether or not we're artists- it is our job, our responsibility, perhaps even our sacred calling, to take whatever life has handed us and make something new, something that wouldn't have existed if not for the fire, the genetic mutation, the sick baby, the accident.
Dani Shapiro
#53. I don't want to lean back into the past, or forward into the future. I don't want to wish the present moment away. The truth is in the present moment. The great paradox is that when I'm really able to do that, time slows down and opens up. Time feels suddenly and inexplicably without end.
Dani Shapiro
#54. What's more important that spiritual life? It seems to me it's the bedrock of everything essential about being human.
Dani Shapiro
#55. I was doing a lot of yoga and learning to meditate, and I found that extremely helpful, and still do and hopefully always will.
Dani Shapiro
#56. Our minds have a tendency to wander. To duck and feint and keep us at a slight remove from the moment at hand.
Dani Shapiro
#57. If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art.
Dani Shapiro
#58. I love living in the country, so much so that I'm even surprised by it. I have met lots of interesting people - the community was really welcoming, and I now probably have a more interesting social life than I did in the city.
Dani Shapiro
#59. Writing has been my window-flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence-my way of interpreting everything within my grasp.
Dani Shapiro
#60. Our minds simply don't function in some sort of narrative chronology. I think that one of the great gifts of writing fiction is being able to think about that.
Dani Shapiro
#61. It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive.
Dani Shapiro
#62. Sometimes when I'm at my desk, I'll realize that I have contorted myself completely, and I haven't moved for hours, and that my legs have fallen asleep. I am elsewhere, not in my body, not in the room, not in my house.
Dani Shapiro
#63. I'm very disciplined, but the one thing that I have addictive behavior about is the Internet.
Dani Shapiro
#64. Music inspires me and puts me in the right mood, but to actually listen to it when I write - I find it gets in the way.
Dani Shapiro
#65. I was raised in an observant Jewish household, so for me, Hebrew prayers - the sounds, the sunlight streaming in from the stained-glass windows of a synagogue - bring my father back to me as surely as if he were sitting next to me, my head pressed against his shoulder.
Dani Shapiro
#66. Recognize the possibility of the divine in any given moment.
Dani Shapiro
#67. Devotion, as it relates to the title of my memoir, means fidelity - as in fidelity to a person or a practice. I think it's certainly possible to feel devotion without having faith, at least in the religious sense of the word.
Dani Shapiro
#68. I'm a full-time writer, which means I have the entire day to get my work done. But that can also be bad, because that means I have the entire day to get in my way.
Dani Shapiro
#69. If there's anything weirder than an introverted writer going to lots of social functions, it's an introverted writer being converted into an accidental guru.
Dani Shapiro
#70. Strange - I'm not much of a film person. I love watching films, but they don't stay with me the way books do. Stranger still, because my husband is a screenwriter!
Dani Shapiro
#71. I often envy my friends who are visual artists. Visual artists have other things to work with. Other media. I envy my sculptor friends: they have hunks of matter. Marble. Wood. It's physical, which I find very appealing. What we have is nothing, is just glaringly blank.
Dani Shapiro
#72. Part of my spiritual work is learning to live with the knowledge that we can't protect our loved ones from pain and heartache.
Dani Shapiro
#73. Apparently, using two spaces after a period has become anachronistic. But tell that to my right thumb. -
Dani Shapiro
#74. I do keep a tiny little journal in which I write passages that I read and want to hold on to. This practice is sort of the opposite of Twitter.
Dani Shapiro
#75. What was going on inside of me became louder because everything around me became quieter.
Dani Shapiro
#77. I'm an urban person who loves living in the country.
Dani Shapiro
#78. I never feel so alive as when I'm writing and the work is going well.
Dani Shapiro
#79. Open your hearts. Deep inside ourselves, we are all one and the same.
Dani Shapiro
#80. I was in my early thirties writing about my early twenties, so there was this way of seeing my younger self from enough of a distance to have perspective but also not to feel that I had to protect myself. My dreams for myself then would have undersold myself in a way.
Dani Shapiro
#81. When I started meditating, even doing yoga, I felt like it was hard to allow myself to develop any other kind of practice [outside of Judaism], like I was somehow being untrue to my heritage, and that was something I had to get over and was probably the greatest revelation to me.
Dani Shapiro
#82. Moving to the country has been incredibly good for my work, for my sense of perspective.
Dani Shapiro
#83. In every generation there is a vault-keeper, one who guards the links fiercely and knows they are more precious than rubies.
Dani Shapiro
#84. I never troll for material. It simply presents itself, and is always unmistakable. This is why I want to roll my eyes when people interrupt themselves in the middle of some story they're telling me to say, "You know you can't write about this."
Dani Shapiro
#85. My dad died when I was 23. His death was sudden and shocking - the result of a car crash - and I never got to say goodbye.
Dani Shapiro
#86. I used to act in television commercials when I was a kid and a young adult.
Dani Shapiro
#87. I had no illusions that now, in some final and dramatic flash of revelation, we would understand one another. We were done. It was a fact of my life
intractable and sad
that our relationship had been a failure. Still, with her prognosis came one last chance to be her daughter. [p. 163]
Dani Shapiro
#88. When I was growing up, I had no idea that I could possibly become a writer. I wrote endlessly in journals - a practice I maintained for a long time, well into the writing life I had no idea I could ever have.
Dani Shapiro
#89. My son is now fourteen, and from the moment he was born, I understood that forevermore my heart would be walking around outside my body.
Dani Shapiro
#90. It would be many years before I began to understand that all of life is practice: writing, driving, hiking, brushing teeth, packing lunch boxes, making beds, cooking dinner, making love, walking dogs, even sleeping. We are always practicing. Only practicing.
Dani Shapiro
#91. We're all simultaneously separated and connected by our devices, staring into our little screens, and also hungry for experience and community.
Dani Shapiro
#92. Confidence is highly overrated when it comes to creating literature. A writer who is overly confident will not engage in the struggle to get it exactly right on the page - but rather, will assume that she's getting it right without the struggle.
Dani Shapiro
#93. Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write
Dani Shapiro
#94. As a writer we are our own instruments; we need to protect our instrument, because no one will protect it if we don't.
Dani Shapiro
#95. The fact is that most husbands, regardless of religion - it's an old-fashioned gender divide where the husband wants to stay home and the wife is the one who drags herself and her children to whatever spiritual center they're going to.
Dani Shapiro
#96. I try to remember that the job - as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy - of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.
Dani Shapiro
#97. When I was writing my first novel, I smoked cigarettes. And when I think about what it was like to smoke, I remember exactly the feeling of sitting in front of my big old computer in that little room where I wrote my first novel.
Dani Shapiro
#98. As a fiction writer, that's been a preoccupation of mine: Can you really just close the door and leave the past back there behind you, or is the door going to blow open at some point?
Dani Shapiro
#99. My parents made the decision never to focus on my looks, and I had no sense of myself as beautiful.
Dani Shapiro
#100. I was raised in an orthodox Jewish home where it was expected that, as a woman, I'd marry an investment banker, raise kids in the suburbs and go to temple. I wasn't raised to set the world on fire.
Dani Shapiro
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