Top 67 Nick Flynn Quotes
#1. What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'
Nick Flynn
#2. I've come to believe that the function of torture in our society is not about getting information, in spite of what we might want to believe. It is merely about power. It tells the world that there is now no limit to what we will do when we feel threatened.
Nick Flynn
#3. Who doesn't want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float?
Nick Flynn
#4. I have plenty of places to go, but no place to be.
Nick Flynn
#5. His impunity thrills me, I mistake it for fearlessness, though years later he will admit to being afraid all the time.
Nick Flynn
#6. Aside from these infrequent outbursts he possesses the gentle demeanor that sometimes trails the newly sober, that deep acceptance that comes with realizing how badly you'd fucked up your life.
Nick Flynn
#7. 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.
Nick Flynn
#8. I'm fast becoming the one who leaves things behind,
Nick Flynn
#9. When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family. My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it.
Nick Flynn
#10. 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.
Nick Flynn
#11. 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.
Nick Flynn
#12. Trinity Park lies directly across from the library, Trinity Church rising like a midieval thought amidst the glass and steel towers.
Nick Flynn
#13. What I was trying to say, maybe, is that I don't know what it is I'm capable of transforming into.
Nick Flynn
#14. Everything we do, I'd imagine, influences everything we will do.
Nick Flynn
#15. There's this sort of male energy that we have that can seem very destructive. But it doesn't have to be. It actually can be a very positive force.
Nick Flynn
#16. IN Incognito the neuroscientist David Eagleman proposes that we are unknown to ourselves: Most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control.
Nick Flynn
#17. To be honest, in my five years as an electrician, I never got the license.
Nick Flynn
#18. My statement to Harris that his book contains much to admire is specious hyperbole. In The End of Faith, Harris rails against religious fundamentalism, which seems obvious, as well as against religious moderates, which seems intolerant.
Nick Flynn
#19. There is a physics to the world, which non-fiction has a contract to stand in awe of, otherwise it becomes completely self-centered and ego-driven, which is the death of a memoir.
Nick Flynn
#20. Many fathers are gone. Some leave, some are left. Some return, unknown and hungry. Only the dog remembers.
Nick Flynn
#21. I was unable to throw myself in the ocean, she writes, the handwriting more erratic as the painkillers seep into every cell, shutting out lights in empty rooms.
Nick Flynn
#22. He claims not to be drinking, but I don't think he knows what this means.
Nick Flynn
#23. Our job as writers, as far as I can tell, is to attempt to express what seems inexpressible.
Nick Flynn
#24. That soldiers do terrible things during wartime should not surprise us.
Nick Flynn
#25. 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.
Nick Flynn
#26. There are many ways to drown, only the most obvious wave their arms as they're going under.
Nick Flynn
#27. I know cigarettes can kill & wonder why she wants to die.
Nick Flynn
#28. You know the way Jesus
rips open his shirt
to show us his heart, all flaming and thorny,
the way he points to it. I'm afraid
the way I'll miss you will be this obvious.
Nick Flynn
#29. I know cigarettes can kill & wonder why she wants to die.
Nick Flynn
#30. Disclaimer:This is a work of nonfiction, but it is also full of dreams, speculations, and shadows. Many names have been changed.
Nick Flynn
#31. And though he knew it was only the whiskey talking, he also knew that the whiskey talked daily.
Nick Flynn
#32. Alcohol is the river we sit on the banks of, contemplating. Sometimes we watch ourselves float past, sometimes we watch ourselves sink.
Nick Flynn
#33. I'm not sure why working at a homeless shelter made sense to me, except that I needed to immerse myself in some sort of larger real-life situation to get me out of the cage of my mind, in some ways.
Nick Flynn
#34. That's the thing about a book: You're in the public life for a little bit, and then you sort of go away for a little while - several years, in my case - and then you come out again, hopefully.
Nick Flynn
#35. 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.
Nick Flynn
#36. You come to realize people are not simple.
Nick Flynn
#37. For the first few months, I was a comically inept parent. The first night home from the hospital, I held her bare body against my bare chest until a friend who was a doctor came by and asked what I was doing, and told me to put some clothes on that baby.
Nick Flynn
#38. Change is one of the only constants in Buddhism; as meditation became the way I breathed in the days, this became apparent.
Nick Flynn
#39. My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it. Part of why she left him was this delusion of greatness and identifying it very directly with being an artist.
Nick Flynn
#40. Water can be a symbol of purification, to stand naked before someone a sign of truth, of nothing to hide. - Nick Flynn
Nick Flynn
#41. What you fear your whole life comes to pass. You end up living toward it, you spend your life running from it but your foot is nailed to the sidewalk. You circle around it until you wear yourself own.
Nick Flynn
#42. In life you get one take, and it's perfect.
Nick Flynn
#43. I can weep pretty easily. I can get tears in my eyes from a beautiful work of art.
Nick Flynn
#44. inside us, a flower taken whole,
a field built inside.
Nick Flynn
#45. The first book I could call mine, my first book, was a picture book, 'The Magic Monkey' - it was adapted from an old Chinese legend by a thirteen-year-old prodigy named Plato Chan with the help of his sister.
Nick Flynn
#46. It is the emptiness of the bowl that creates the bowl
Nick Flynn
#47. Read as much as you can. Write only when you feel the inner need to do so. And don't ever rush into print.
Nick Flynn
#48. I get inspired by my friends, and if a friend is a writer, that is even deeper.
Nick Flynn
#49. For years before I became a father, I would try to spend as much time as I could with my friends who were parents and their kids. And I was really impressed. They all sort of managed to do it, and do it gracefully.
Nick Flynn
#50. The only strategy I know of is to write every day, which I don't always do, because sometimes I just can't, for various reasons that seem out of my control.
Nick Flynn
#51. I'd always imagined that one day I would be a father, but mostly it was off my radar. I admired friends who had somehow figured out how to cross that threshold.
Nick Flynn
#52. By the time I'm nine I know the world is a dangerous place. I've heard whispers about razorblades in apples, about Charlie Manson and his family. But no one is offering any clear information.
Nick Flynn
#53. I had to steel myself against this psychic devastation - to see your father on the street. It's hard enough to pick up somebody you don't know from the streets, and then to actually have other people pick your father up - it was psychically devastating.
Nick Flynn
#54. 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.
Nick Flynn
#55. 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.
Nick Flynn
#56. I believe poetry has very little to do with memory.
Nick Flynn
#57. OUT of that moment Jesus was nailed to his cross flowed our attempts to represent it, to create a narrative that could contain it. Yet the body, hanging there, is still, simply, terrible. Caravaggio's genius was to paint Jesus with dirty feet, to bring him back down to earth.
Nick Flynn
#58. We fill the nothing with suns,
line them up,
swallow sap, swallow
field, drop by drop, each stem
a pump. Rose to rose to rose to
rose to rose to rose to rose, calyx &
anther, all summer
gone.
Nick Flynn
#59. My father's on my radar, but most of the time I shut it off.
Nick Flynn
#60. Perhaps everyone has a story that could break your heart ...
Nick Flynn
#61. Even a life raft is only supposed to get you from the sinking ship back to land, you were never intended to live in the life raft, to drift years on end, in sight of land but never close enough.
Nick Flynn
#62. Not a formidable presence, except in that madman way that drunks wield, that does-it-look-like-I-give-a-fuck-about-anything?
Nick Flynn
#63. It's the way I walk through the world, carrying that fear, that the beloved will go, will die, and that I will be the one to blame.
Nick Flynn
#64. 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.
Nick Flynn
#66. That Dick Cheney is pro-torture surprises no one; he freely admits it.
Nick Flynn
#67. The attention one gets from being a poet isn't great.
Nick Flynn
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