Image: Charles Kremenak, CC BY 2.5
27 quotes
American writer
“The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.”
"We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies."
on Empathy
"The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany."
on Philosophy
"Fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already loss."
on Fear
"The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist."
on Life
"Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task."
on Wisdom
"You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it."
on Writing
"Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of."
"... a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane."
"The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss."
"I have been both a ghost and haunted in the city I love."
on Love
"[B]eauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears."
"The art is not one of forgetting but letting go"
"Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible."
"...I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival..."
"Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it."
"A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape."
"Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone."
"To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient."
"Disenchantment is the blessing of becoming yourself."
"Hope just means another world might be possible, not promise, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope."
on Hope
