Pat Schneider Quotes

#1. Putting words onto paper - when it is done as an honest act of search or connection, rather than as an act of manipulation, performance, self-aggrandizement or self-protection - is a holy act.

Pat Schneider

#2. To pray is to open oneself completely, intimately, into the Presence that is beyond our ability to name.

Pat Schneider

#3. Writing and prayer are both a form of love, and love takes courage.

Pat Schneider

#4. Darkness and light are inextricably bound together.

Pat Schneider

#5. But if you worry about other people as you write a first draft, you will not be able to free your unconscious mind to give up its treasures. It will be bound by the great dogs of your fear,

Pat Schneider

#6. What a pity. How the stars
and seas and rivers
in their fragile lace of fog
go on without us
morning after morning,
year after year.
And we disappear.

Pat Schneider

#7. Be led by your joy.

Pat Schneider

#8. Maybe the bottom of my own night is a darkness I cannot descend into without "the light that is within me" becoming dark.

Pat Schneider

#9. Even those truths that are painful will ultimately increase my wisdom, undergird my strength, make possible my art.

Pat Schneider

#10. Surprise is a major factor in distinguishing an answer to prayer from a projection of my own mental processes. When I can't believe I made up the answer myself, I have to look around to see where it came from.

Pat Schneider

#11. The more we open ourselves to love, the larger our capacity for love becomes.

Pat Schneider

#12. Writing as an art form belongs to all people, regardless of economic class or educational level ... A writer is someone who writes.

Pat Schneider

#13. When we neglect the artist in ourselves, there is a kind of mourning that goes on under the surface of our busy lives.

Pat Schneider

#14. I learned without her saying a word that there are truly many ways to pray, and lighting a candle is one of them.

Pat Schneider

#15. It occurred to me that when I begin to write, I open myself and wait. And when I turn toward an inner spiritual awareness, I open myself and wait.

Pat Schneider

#16. If I am an artist, I have a vocation. As one drawn to a lover or called to a religious mission, I go to my work - my writing - because it is essential to my happiness.

Pat Schneider

#17. I am like you, curious and small. Like you, I pause alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun's slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved.5

Pat Schneider

#18. A writer is someone who writes!

Pat Schneider

#19. Something in me that was broken, cracked - becomes whole. The cracks, if I write them with utter honesty, are where "the light gets in." The present meets the past, and healing begins.

Pat Schneider

#20. I go fishing in my mind. I put out bait, the bait of my own longing, my desire, and my hunger for connection, for a tug of something alive at the end of a line. Something that I may have to struggle with to pull in, but that will be wild and important to me, whether I keep it or let it go.

Pat Schneider

#21. God's love is God's attention.

Pat Schneider

#22. Are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground

Pat Schneider

#23. The panther that has stalked you
since you were a child
is old now. No longer wild,
and tired of guarding the treasure
you yourself left behind -
blind and deaf, she will give it all to you
if you just let her go.

Pat Schneider

#24. To grow in craft is to increase the bredth of what I can do, but art is the depth, the passion, the desire, the courage to be myself and myself alone.

Pat Schneider

#25. Both writing and praying are acts of deep vulnerability.

Pat Schneider

#26. Jesus said, But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.

Pat Schneider