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It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters.

Dani Shapiro

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Dani Shapiro
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: April 10
Author
Novelist
New York City
New York
Able
Powers
Thus
Distance
Characters
Turn
Turns
Stories
Fashioning
Character
Observation

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You can start your day over anytime.
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We don't choose what's going to wake us up.
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If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt it has to be creative.
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In a creative journey, it is essential, no matter how far one runs, to examine that which is closest to home.
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If we grew up with nothing, we're complicated with that. That's the thing I keep hearing from people.
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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.
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I'm an urban person who loves living in the country.
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I did want to feel like life's all of one piece.
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Writing has been my window-flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence-my way of interpreting everything within my grasp.
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When I near the end of a book, it feels as if the entire universe meets me more than halfway and supports me. The whole world seems to shimmer when I find the words. My mind quiets.
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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.
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My parents made the decision never to focus on my looks, and I had no sense of myself as beautiful.
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I remember getting my first cell phone in New York, getting into a taxi and thinking This is the end of solitude in the back of a taxi. What used to happen in the back of a taxi? You looked out the window. My brain has become less able to spend lengths of time without shifting, and I worry about that.
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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.
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We can't protect ourselves from pain and heartache. In fact, to love - fully, madly, deeply - is the ensure heartache some day.
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I think there's something about a writer's disposition, that is, even if unaware, always slightly in a witness state.
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What's more important that spiritual life? It seems to me it's the bedrock of everything essential about being human.
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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]
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Our pain is a part of who we authentically are.
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We are tyrannized by our options.
Dani Shapiro