I have spent a good many years… being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.
—Stephen King
I have twenty-one pages, unusable, unprintable, destructive of the book as my mind still partly sees it, contradictory of character and inconsistent in tone. But I am undoubtedly started.
—Janet Burroway
Yes, illness and grief were a part of us, indefinitely—but so, too, were love and the ability to listen and learn over time, however long that might be.
—Sarah Silbert
If I were God, I would make a world just like this one, where everyone comes raw and naked and dependent into it; where everyone enters bloody between the legs or through the cut belly of a woman; where nothing is for certain and there is so much to learn. I would make the world unfair as this world is unfair, because only in a world like this one is it possible that maybe the rich will take down their fences; maybe the poor will get together and break the fences down; maybe those who know how to read will teach those who don't. Maybe the fed will feed the hungry. Maybe the lion will lie down by the lamb.
—Pat Schneider
There are no miracles. There are no trumpets, no fanfares, no absolutions.But she sees now that there are brief moments of, if not goodness, then kindness: a thoughtful gesture, a friendly word, an absence of anger now and again.
—Christiane Buuck
We go on, she told me, because we must. We go on because our life is bigger than the grief. We cry when we need to cry, and get angry when we need to get angry. God will forgive us when we curse him. We go on, she said, until we finally have a day when the pain is not so great.
—Rosa R.
This night I am here: in this bruised self, in this bruised world.
—Joe Wilkins
Walking my woods, I see every tree, every sprig of jewelweed, every salamander, and, yes, every snake trying to hold on in a paved world, and I'm reminded exactly what hard work survival is.
—Dana Wildsmith
When I think about the fact that a nation has sentenced me to death, all I can do is turn inside myself, to the place in my heart that wants so desperately to feel human, still connected to this world, as if I have a purpose.
—Jarvis Jay Masters
If you open yourself to grace working through you, then grace works on you and in you as well. Grace is what has kept me going.
—John Records
We're all doing time. The highest compliment in prison is "He knows how to do his own time." How few of us do.
—Bo Lozoff
I gathered my shoes and wallet on the other side of the metal detector and took a last glance at my father, who was still there, still waving.That mangled finger had always been a symbol of his shortcomings and deformities to me, but now I saw it was also a testament to all that he'd sacrificed for our family.He'd lost that trigger finger building the business that had fed and clothed me. I imagined he was not only waving me goodbye but waving me forward with that symbol of his own woundedness.
—Shozan Jack Haubner
It's better to go into the world half-cocked than not to go into the world at all.
—James Hillman
Artists who whine because they need a grant and the government doesn't help them—well, tough shit. I had the same problem. I worked in a bookstore for seven years to make money to buy art supplies. And that was fine. I don't think artists should ever expect anything from anybody. For the artist, sacrifice and hardship are a part of the process.
—Patti Smith
Happy and content one day, / ambition and desire eat you alive the next. / It's always been this way. Back and forth, / back and forth. That's the way it goes.
—David Budbill